Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

by Florence King

  “What’s that mean?”

  “When your grandmother joined the Daughters, she produced proof of twenty-three qualified ancestors. But she only needed one.”

  “ … Oh. I get it.”

  On our way back home we stopped by the arcade market on 14th Street and had a snack. I had coffee, which usually involved a struggle with the disapproving counter girl, and Herb, who had a sweet tooth, chose a sundae. A popular concoction at this time was something called an Ethiopian Delight—green pistachio ice cream for Mussolini, chocolate syrup for Haile Selassie, and a cherry for the League of Nations. It was the kind of cue Herb always took advantage of; when we got home, he pointed out Ethiopia on the map and showed me pictures of Mussolini and Haile Selassie in Life.

  He taught me how to print my name, and devised a way to teach me how to write in script. In the early hours of the morning after he got home from work, he sat at the kitchen table laboriously dotting out my name over and over in a drugstore tablet. I spent the next several days tracing the dots until I was able to sign myself with a fairly respectable flourish.

  All went well until he tested my ear with the idea of giving me music lessons.

  “Sing this,” he said, playing a note. I complied.

  “Now this,” he said, playing another one.

  “They’re the same,” I protested.

  “She’s right,” said Mama. “I’m a witness. Sounded like the same goddamn toot to me.”

  He gave us a long studious look, nodded in resignation, and put his clarinet away.

  Our apartment gave every evidence of having been decorated by Jekyll and Hyde. “Herb’s alcove,” as it was known, was a model of spartan order, while Mama’s bedroom looked at all times as if the Gestapo had just searched it. Granny saw nothing unladylike about this and in fact encouraged slovenliness as a mark of aristocracy. She looked down on good housekeepers, dismissing them as “scrubbers.” A scrubber, I learned early on, is a Northern woman who substitutes good housekeeping for good blood; knowing that she can never be a lady, she develops a bee in her bonnet (i.e., unfeminine insanity) about being able to “eat off the floor.”

  It was virtually impossible to eat off our table, hidden as it was under skeins of crochet yarn and clippings from the sports page that Mama was saving for her baseball scrapbook. Slut’s wool like gone-to-seed dandelions lay undisturbed under our furniture, dishes were piled up to the spigot in the sink, the refrigerator handle stuck to our hands, little pieces of singed food clung to the stove burners, and the oven door had a permanent gummy border of gravy and long rivulets of greasy scum. In Reflections in a Golden Eye, describing the stove of the Captain’s wife, who was half-Yankee, Carson McCullers wrote: “Their gas stove was not crusted with generations of dirt as her grandmother’s had been, but then it was by no means clean.”

  Ours was a pureblooded stove.

  Jensy still came once a week, but except for washing the dishes she did little to alleviate the mess. She and Granny spent most of the day sitting at the cluttered table drinking coffee and talking about how wonderful the world would be if only they could run it. When they finished their encyclicals, they polished the silver.

  Their silver ritual was supposed to teach me the ladylike art of taking care of my “things.” Silver is the Southern woman’s proudest possession and highest priority as well as the subject of much of her conversation. The night before her daughter’s wedding, a Southern mother will sit on the bed and talk intimately about silver. Every decent woman goes to her husband with twelve “covers,” and if the knives have hollow handles he’ll be running with other women before the year is out, you wait and see. No man respects a woman with hollow handles.

  A marriage can fall apart if a bride does not choose her silver pattern carefully. A good pattern is known as “They’ve been making that one forever.” A bad pattern is known as “They don’t make silver the way they used to.” Bad patterns are the stark modern designs that are easy to keep clean; a good pattern is as busy as a Grecian frieze and manifests what silver company brochures call “the elegant and highly prized glow of deep patina,” i.e., those black lines made by ground-in dirt that you can’t get at no matter how many gauze-wrapped toothpicks you use.

  My first household chore was wrapping gauze around toothpicks so Granny and Jensy could sit in the midst of wall-to-wall patina and polish silver. They polished it while it was still shining from their last polishing; they polished it while a mouse gnawed happily through a soggy bag of garbage; they polished it while a flapping window shade gave off a duststorm under their noses. Our silver was the only thing in our home that was ever really clean, which is a sure sign of a Southern home.

  Granny’s pattern was the goodest of the good, as furrowed as a damaged brain and so full of acorns and rosebuds that our palms ached after every meal. Thanks to its Laocoön intricacies, it frequently served as a salvaging conversation piece for appalled visitors who were trying not to look at the filth, like Mr. Van Vrees, the insurance man, who was from Poughkeepsie. Granny always offered him coffee and asked for news of his ailing mother.

  “She’s having trouble with her knees,” he said. “They’re so sore and swollen she can’t stand up.”

  “Oh, what a shame,” Granny commiserated. “Whatever caused it?”

  “I … er … I really don’t know … . The doctor can’t—Say! This is beautiful silver. What’s it called?”

  “Williamsburg Carbuncle,” said Herb.

  Something that actually did run in our family was agnosticism. Herb believed in reincarnation, Mama preferred unorthodox home truths like “When you’re dead you’re dead,” and Granny’s theology had been enervated by her superiority complex. A lifetime of looking down on the Bible Belt South as only a Virginian can had driven her into a bizarre form of heresy: Christianity reminded her of places like Georgia. As usual there was an etiquette factor in her thinking. She objected strenuously to the Baptist habit of referring to “Jesus” as though he lived down the road and always carefully said “Our Lord Jesus Christ,” yet her views on his place in the heavenly pecking order were bleak.

  “Girls in occupied countries always get in trouble with soldiers,” she said, when I asked her what the Virgin birth was.

  She did, however, believe in Heaven because it was a ladylike place with pink clouds, harp music, and a man to open the door, but most of all she believed in that Chivas Regal of Protestantism, the Episcopal Church. About every six weeks or so she became spiritually gravid, awakening on Sunday morning with a smug smile that told us she was in the mood to lord it with the Lord.

  “I think it would be nice if we went to church today,” she said modestly.

  “I hate hats!” Mama yelled.

  Granny always argued her down and plunked one of her own Empress Eugénie numbers on Mama’s unwilling head. I donned a sickeningly sweet bonnet with long velvet ribbons bought expressly for these redemptive excursions. We alternated between Grace Church in Georgetown, where I was eventually christened, and St. George’s in Arlington. Granny led the way up the aisle trailing fascinators and Djer Kiss dusting powder. After making sure she had everyone’s attention, she went into a full genuflection and made the sign of the cross over her jutting bosom, eyes closed in perfect devotion. When the spirit had passed, she signaled Mama and Herb with a flap of her elbows and they stepped forward and hauled her to her feet.

  The service was no sooner under way before she went to sleep. Whenever she slumped in one direction, Mama or Herb would give her a shoulder nudge and send her the other way. I kept hoping she would start snoring while I had plenty of witnesses but she had to be on her back to do her best. Upright, all she produced was a rhythmic poc! that punctuated our whispers.

  “The third soprano from the right is flat.”

  “I’m going to be flat on the floor if I don’t have a cigarette.”

  “Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers
of this night.”

  “What’s a snite?” I asked.

  After church we always drove over to Congressional Cemetery to visit the family plot. It contained two graves. One belonged to my grandfather, whose stern gray slab contained a Masonic emblem and the dates 1868—1921. The other stone was a tiny white one topped by a reclining lamb and inscribed with the wistful dates 1905-1910. It belonged to Mama’s brother Charlie, who had died of polio when she was a baby. I loved the lamb and always patted it.

  “Why did he have to die, Granny?” I asked one Sunday.

  She shifted on the stone bench and sighed. “It was July, and so hot, the hottest day I ever saw. He went off to play, and when he came home he turned the hose on himself. I always thought that was what did it—President Roosevelt went swimming on a hot day. He took sick that night. The doctor came but there was nothing he could do. The paralysis took his legs and rose up. When it reached his lungs, he was gone.”

  She stared for a moment at the wedding ring that was now embedded in the flesh of her finger. “The undertaker couldn’t come right away—Ballston was real country then and he was off somewhere on another call—so we had to have ice. Everybody in town brought us theirs, and Mr. Ruding and I took turns sitting beside Charlie and keeping the ice on him.”

  She shook her head slowly. “It’s the strangest disease … . Your mother was a baby in her crib, lying right there in the next room, but she didn’t catch it. I wonder if they’ll ever figure out what causes it?”

  Looking up, I saw Mama watching Granny with an expression of mute pleading. Suddenly, in some instinctive way, I understood something: Charlie had been Granny’s favorite child. Mama was too young to remember him, but his ghost must have shaped her life, urging her to become a tomboy to replace the son Granny had lost. I think Herb must have understood it, too, the way he always understood everything about people. It explained why he was the only member of the family who never tried to tone Mama down; he seemed to know that she had to act out her conflicts, and in her own brusque way she was grateful to him.

  On most Sundays we visited family in Virginia. “Our people,” Granny always called them, disliking the word “family” for its bourgeois implications. Anyone could have a family. She wanted a race all to herself, a breed apart, a private gene pool in which to dunk herself with ponderous grace the way she did at Colonial Beach in her skirted bathing costume.

  It boiled down to paying a day-long call on Aunt Nana and sitting in her dim parlor talking about whose mind was going and who was passing clots. Granny and Aunt Nana did all the talking, with Granny eventually dominating the conversation for reasons that were clear to me even at four: however much Aunt Nana might wish otherwise, the fact remained that very few women lost their minds, while all women menstruated, all women had the menopause, and most women gave birth. Long after Aunt Nana had run out of hand-wringing maniacs, Granny still had a full storehouse of pelvic disarray to relate.

  Herb called her Sunday monologues “The Ovariad.” He always retreated to the kitchen to play chess with Billy Bosworth, Evelyn Cunningham’s husband. They were not friends—Herb had no male friends—but there was a certain bond between them. Herb had given Evelyn away, so to speak, when he handed her over to Billy in front of the National Geographic Society on the night of the lecture, so Billy regarded him as a kind of father-in-law.

  Evelyn, of course, could not get enough of “The Ovariad.” She sat at Granny’s feet and I sat in a corner chair reading my library book while the sanguine saga gushed and flowed around me.

  “It just went splat and there she was wearing a white dress. She found a lump as big as a golfball in it. She thought it might be a cancer starting so she called the doctor and he told her to bring it over in ajar and let him look at it, but she was so upset she left the jar on the streetcar and had to go down to the car barn and fill out a Lost and Found form before she could get it back. By that time it was all dried up.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Louise, the child can hear you!”

  Granny worried constantly that I would be corrupted by Mama’s cussing, but she did not care how much of “The Ovariad” I heard. To her way of thinking, it was part of my training in Southern ladyhood. Thus, by the age of four, I was conversant with wombs, tubes, polyps, cauterized cervixes, curettage, floods, flows, splats, and the change of life. Menstruation was such a commonplace topic that I could not understand why drugstores modestly wrapped Kotex in brown paper before placing them on the shelves. If druggists could have heard what I heard in Aunt Nana’s parlor, they would have sold them with full-color photographs of blood-soaked napkins on the front of the box.

  Granny continued her Ovariad at the movies whenever the plot gave her the slightest encouragement. She hit pay dirt the day we went to see the Technicolor foxhunt extravaganza Virginia, starring Madeleine Carroll and Sterling Hayden. It began with carefree scenes of riding to hounds, but to Granny’s delight the healthful outdoor exercise soon stopped. Madeleine fainted on the field and took to her chaise longue, where, fetchingly attired in a black riding habit that emphasized her pallor, she sipped delicately at a medicinal glass of port.

  Madeleine actually had TB, but Granny was not interested in any organ as high up as lungs. She immediately jumped to conclusions.

  “Wine makes blood,” she whispered to me. “She had a miscarriage, only they can’t come right out and say it. She had no business bouncing up and down on that old horse—that’s bad for a woman’s parts.”

  Soon Madeleine weakened so much that she had to go away to a sanitorium. Before she left she promised to come back to Virginia, and she did. She returned in a coffin that was deposited at the train station, and Sterling Hayden had to sign for it.

  “He knew she was too weak to carry a child. He should have been more considerate! The doctor should have told him not to bother her!”

  It was the first of her comments that I did not understand. As voluble as she was about how babies, either whole or liquefied, came out, she was remarkably taciturn about how they got in. She divided sex into two categories: the unmentionable kind involving men and copulation, and the fun kind.

  “Granny,” I said as we walked home from the show, “how did Sterling Hayden bother Madeleine Carroll to death?”

  “Never mind.”

  “But I want to know.”

  “You’re too young.”

  “Granny, please tell me!”

  “Oh, all right,” she said irritably.

  I waited breathlessly for the revelation.

  “Your grandfather was a perfect gentleman.”

  Going to the movies with Mama exposed me to an entirely different kind of running commentary:

  They Died With Their Boots On: “I wish he’d stop kissing her and lead a cavalry charge.”

  The Women: “What this needs is George Raft.”

  Anna Karenina: “Oh boy, here comes the train!”

  Back Street: “That woman ought to have her head examined.”

  Madame X: “She’s wasting the taxpayers’ money.”

  Kings Row: “How the hell is he going to do her any good? He can’t even turn over without help.”

  Many years later when my insular life opened up and I met people whose second language was Yiddish, I learned that Mama was what is known as a klutz. There is a comparable Southern word, but never having seen it in print, I am not sure of the spelling. It is either “slewfoot” or “sluefoot.” The first is a variant of “slough” or “slog” and suggests someone tramping through mudholes or swamps in heavy boots. The second is a nautical word of unknown origin that refers to the violent swing of a ship’s spar, or any lurching, veering movement.

  However it is spelled, it’s a word I grew up hearing. It invariably cropped up whenever Southerners discussed Eleanor Roosevelt, but to me it was my mother’s nickname. Granny brought it out on a long sigh whenever Mama did some domestic thing badly or started a fire with her cigarette, and my uncle, undoubtedly to get e
ven for “Gottapot,” called her “Slewfoot Lou.”

  That slewfootedness affected her mothering is like saying that hemophilia affected the course of the Romanov dynasty. Today I admire her lack of vocation for motherhood, but at four I was convinced that she was trying to murder me. Two things happened, one on top of the other, that made me draw this disturbing conclusion. The first involved the sudden disappearance of most of my teeth.

  It was, as Snoopy would say, a dark and stormy night. Herb was at work, and Granny was in Richmond visiting her sister, which meant that Mama was playing without an infield. It also meant that she was in charge of the cooking, so we walked up to the Chinese restaurant on 14th Street to get some carry-out.

  “I’m cold,” I said, as we headed back home.

  “Walk under my coat,” Mama offered.

  It worked fine until we came to the corner of 13th and Park Road. I can still see the curbstone looming up in front of me as I write this, just as it loomed up that night when I tripped and fell and hit my mouth on it. There was a shattering pain, and the terrifying purplish color of my blood in the dirty yellow glow of the streetlamp.

  It was not the kind of crisis that brought out Mama’s strength. She would have been great on the Titanic or in an air raid; at Little Big Horn or Thermopylae she would have stolen the show from Custer and Leonidas, but at 13th and Park Road she fell apart. Moaning “Oh, Jesus Christ … oh, shit!” she slung me over her shoulder like a sack of meal and ran the rest of the way home.

  In the kitchen, when she got a good look at me, an expression of helpless terror spread over her face. All of my front teeth were knocked out except one that hung by a thread of flesh, and the inside of my bottom lip felt like the surface of a cheese grater. I was screaming in pain and fear and there was blood everywhere, even on my shoes.

  Mama’s solution was salt. Grabbing the blue box of Morton’s from the stove, she opened the spout, yanked my head back by my hair, and poured the stuff directly into my mouth. Naturally, some of it went up my nose and into my eyes. I won’t even try to describe the agony.