Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  This gave Aunt Mimi the opportunity to swoon into a chair. Julia Ellen loudly feared for her angina, and the entire gathering fussed over the shrinking form of Mary (Monzie) Alverta Buckingham Dundore giving a stellar performance.

  As Mother used to say about Sis, “She hasn’t missed a tragedy in seventy years.”

  She certainly didn’t miss this one.

  Barbara Bailey drily commented, “Well, I can see you didn’t make anything up in Six of One and Bingo.”

  Mother’s friends partied until deep into twilight and deep into the grape, too. We finally poured the last one into his car and I sat down for a Coke.

  I remembered Mother telling me to jump into her arms when I crouched on the roof.

  I remembered her walking me to Violet Hill Elementary the first day of school.

  I remembered her destroying my paint set.

  The memories rolled in like the Atlantic at high title: Mother holding down ten bingo cards at the York Fair, determined to win a blanket. Mother tossing off her shoes and wading in the Chesapeake; soft-shell crabs boiling in the pepper pot. Mother joking with a groom at the Shedrow and winking at me to gather more information. Mother and Dad singing in church. Mom dancing better than anyone I’ve ever seen outside of the movies. Mom calling me “the Pick,” “the Ill,” “Buzzer” and, on a few saccharine occasions for public consumption, “my Rita.”

  My favorite memory of Mother involved steeplechasing. She attended the first Montpelier event in 1934, and liked what she saw. When Foxfield started in Charlottesville, she’d fly in for the fall races. She much preferred them to the spring. She’d walk the fence line where the patrons parked. Carrying a bottle of champagne, she’d chat up people, laugh and bet. We all know that betting on horses is illegal in the great state of Virginia, but it’s one of those laws everyone smiles about. She’d have a pencil behind her ear, her race card in her hand.

  What people saw was this adorable, peppy lady with silver curls who could kill you laughing. What I saw was Pancho Villa without the mustache.

  Mother never left Foxfield without at least a thousand dollars in her pocket.

  She’d giggle when we drove away. “Never bet against a Buckingham.”

  “It’s a shame the way you take advantage of people, Mom.”

  “Yep.” Then she’d squeal with laughter.

  One particular Foxfield when she cleaned the clock of a particularly pompous racehorse owner, she made me laugh so hard I dropped a wheel off the road. A tow truck assisted by pulling us out of the ditch. She had the presence of mind, amidst guffaws, to stick all the money down her bra.

  There will never be another Juts.

  70

  The Amen Corner

  Death is a greatly overrated experience. I hated Mother’s and I’m not looking forward to my own. Apart from the sorrow there are the bills to be paid.

  Nobody dies for free.

  I sold my car and most of my jewelry. Seeing my beautiful black and silver car glide down the driveway made me sick. A car for me is more than a means of transport, it’s a repository of emotions.

  Little B.B. had come home with me. When my back was turned he walked a half mile down to Route 20, still looking for Mother. He found her. Hit by a car, B.B. was buried under the rosebushes.

  Martina didn’t bother to send condolences when Mom died.

  Fannie did, shortly needing my condolences, as she lost both her parents within a year of each other.

  My longtime agent, Wendy Weil, lost her mother, father and brother within a year.

  Two days after Mother died, an executive from Hill/Mandelker, a film production company, called, saying, “I’m sorry your mother is dead. Think you’ll make your deadline?” Phil Mandelker was dead of AIDS by then or that call would never have been made. I finished the teleplay for The Long Hot Summer right on time but I never forgot the appalling lack of decency.

  Forgetting or remembering became sacred acts after Mother died.

  The reconstruction of memory fascinates us. What we remember. What we forget. According to scientists, we literally do reconstruct memory. There isn’t a single bank vault in the brain for the past, it’s scattered throughout the brain. When you and I recall an event or a person we pull from different areas. Some people may recall a fact more easily than an emotion. For others it would be the reverse.

  And an event we know well might be reconstructed with some variation each time it’s brought forward.

  The delicious dilemma is, can you ever know your own life? Of course you can know events. My memories of Mom, Dad, Aunt Mimi, Virginia, Kenny and Big Mimi illuminate my mind like cave paintings. It’s the beginning of my life.

  I don’t know if an individual’s life recapitulates civilization but those early people and memories are my cave paintings.

  What I can’t know is what my life means to anyone else. I can get the Big Head and carry on about this contribution and that one, but hell, we don’t even remember who invented barbed wire in this country and the West couldn’t have been tamed without it. We can look up the inventor in a book but we don’t know it like we know a Coca-Cola sign. If we can’t easily remember him, I don’t know who will remember me or why.

  Then again, will I remember me?

  Youth moves out, leaving no forwarding address. No matter how you try, you can’t reach that person again or that place.

  Even the BVM changes with time. In one century she is the personification of perfect motherhood; in another, she’s our intermediary to Christ.

  If the Blessed Mother can change, so can I.

  But will I change for the better?

  A funny thing about America is our attitude toward personal change. We’re all for technological advances—at least, most of us are; I’m not sold on it. But when people change, everyone decides something must have been out of kilter before. Maybe that’s why some people can’t change. They’re afraid they’ll lose face.

  Mother’s death fomented major change in my life, internally and externally. I don’t know how long it will take me to fully understand those changes.

  I sold her pink house.

  I started riding with a vengeance.

  Those things are easy to catalogue.

  What amazed me were the memories flooding over me in the years immediately after her death. Odd bits and pieces of the past, like one winter evening when Mother made me play Parcheesi with Uncle Will, Dad’s uncle, while everyone else played poker. Poor Uncle Will by that time had such thick glasses the sides of them were pink. He could barely see the Parcheesi board. He really wanted to play pinochle and I really wanted to play poker.

  We played and played, dutifully chatting away. On the surface this is not a dramatic memory. Underneath it is important. We were together enjoying one another’s company. I confronted old age with Uncle Will. I learned I could make someone happy by being there, by paying attention. Mother won everyone’s money, of course.

  Then there was the time Mother and Pastor Golder provided unintended entertainment. Pastor Golder had been trying to lure the congregation into a financial meeting for the better part of 1957. The church was small, the congregation emphatically not wealthy. He finished the service but withheld the benediction. No one could leave.

  Then he read out the financial report. Mother, eager to flounce around on the beach, fumed.

  The church car was dying a slow death. The local Oldsmobile dealer, a Lutheran, I bet, had given Pastor Golder a very good deal on a new Oldsmobile.

  That was too much for Mom. While the rest of the congregation meekly listened, Mother put up her hand.

  “Julia Brown.”

  Mother stood up. She cast her lustrous gray eyes around the congregation, smiling at everyone. “Jesus walked in sandals. I don’t see anywhere in the Bible where Jesus drives a new Oldsmobile. So I don’t know why you have to have one.”

  “Oh, Mom!”

  I realized I carried ghosts, spirits of the dead. This was less a haunting than
a blessing, a repository of memories, a treasure of shared laughter. Big Mimi, Daddy, Ken, Virginia, Jack Young, Mother and Dad Brown, even my hero Citation, pressed against me daily. I could hear their voices, although what I heard was what they’d said in the past. But what they’d said is as true now as it was then.

  What I couldn’t have was their response to current ideas and events. Or could I? I knew these people, an imperfect knowing, just as I imperfectly know myself, which is a good thing. If I knew myself totally, where would be the surprises? Anyway, I knew them.

  I ask, “What would Dad have done?” or “What would Mother say about this?”

  I never knew how strong love ties were. Death does not “Us do part.” Death takes the body, not the soul. I don’t know about karma or life after death or any of that stuff. But I know I can reach that love. If I study the life of someone I didn’t know, like Dolley Madison, on some level I can use her experience, her emotions for my life.

  Nothing and no one is lost. Dead, yes. Lost, no.

  All life is a conversation between those who went before, those alive now and those who will come after. All life is a conversation between life forms, plants and animals.

  Life breathes. Life is communication.

  I prefer this communication be in English. It’s such a robust tongue and I’m spoiled by it.

  I can speak cat, hound and horse. I can read Latin, a utter of Greek. I can understand a little German but I dare not speak it, just as I can understand a smattering of French but am too embarrassed to open my mouth.

  But English, that torrent of sound, that cathedral of meaning, that legacy of thousands of years (counting Latin), is all mine.

  When I remember Mom and Dad I remember in English. I hear this complex, shaded and ironic language as they spoke it.

  Not only did they feed me, clothe me, shelter me and teach me right from wrong (not that I always listened), they gave me my tool, they gave me this tongue. The guttural sound of Anglo-Saxon married to the music of Latin.

  I believe language shapes us more than we shape it. I would like to think I would have been a writer no matter when and where I appeared, but to write in English, that’s a gift not just from Mom and Dad but from the gods. And to use southern English is piling Pelion on Parnassus: it’s perfect.

  When Mother died I was both freed and abandoned, as are we all at this profound juncture in our lives. In straining to hear her voice, I heard anew the cadence of comedy. She was nothing if not funny, even when she was dreadful.

  That hot, sad August day in 1983 is still with me. It’s not that I remain close to her death. I understand death. What I’m trying to understand is whether my passionate love of language, land and animals has relevance for anyone but myself. And I listen for the cadence of her voice, my very first English speaker.

  Mother’s generation saw more technological change than any generation ever. I doubt future humans will make any leap as big as the turn-of-the-century generation, those born between 1890 and 1910. Mom grew up with horse-and-buggy transport and lived to see a man walk on the moon. She took it in stride, forgive the pun.

  I feel closer to her generation than to any other, including my own. Their resilence, raucous humor and charming civility resonate like an echo of a better time. There are few of this generation left. Many of them survived World War I, plunged into the frenzy of the twenties and then endured the Depression, only to emerge into World War II. They truly were unique.

  Mother certainly was. She didn’t expect anyone to take care of her, least of all the government. She had a healthy disrespect for government. She didn’t pay much attention to economists either. She knew life could be hard but she intended to wrest what joy there was from it. That she did.

  When she died I knew I had to hold not just her memory but the memory of her time. I realized that I was like the moon; my shining face was that of my time but the hidden side was Mother’s time. Mother’s generation. I draw great strength from those people.

  Most people present themselves as being on the cutting edge. I’m not. I’m a throwback. I belong to those turn-of-the-century tigers.

  Mom, Dad, PopPop Harmon, Reuben and Caroline Brown, Big Mimi and Little Mimi invaded my thoughts constantly. Belle and Beulah, alive again in my dreams, called me to the chase. Which brought me full circle back to Toby, the hound that ran silent.

  PopPop, battling the bottle after having battled the Germans, showed me the way. I remembered Mother’s respect toward her stepfather. It took me these many years to finally figure it out.

  Once PopPop let me accompany him when he released Toby, keeping Belle and Beulah back in the kennel. A big contest was to be held at nine the next morning. We ran after him, the frost crunching underfoot. The hunt was a “drag,” which meant the scent was laid out by humans; the hounds wouldn’t be finding live foxes. Anyway, the organizers put down the scent at about three in the morning. It was about four when PopPop took Toby out. The frost would hold the scent until contest time.

  When we again showed up at nine o’clock, PopPop knew exactly where to cast Belle and Beulah. He won the money and the dog food.

  Dishonest? Well, it wasn’t sporting, but I was too little to know if this was breaking a rule or not. I never heard anyone talk about a hound running silently except in the most disparaging terms.

  What I gathered from this experience was that hounds were all PopPop had left. The trenches had taken their toll, Big Mimi’s death had left him hollow, and booze filled up the void. Hounds and hunting by scent kept him alive.

  He couldn’t hold a job. He had to win these contests at least sometimes. So he figured out a way. Mother respected him for that. He wouldn’t take anything she offered other than food or some clothing occasionally. People didn’t take handouts then, not even from their own families. The shame was more painful than the poverty.

  Mom would say, “You got to make hell with what you have.”

  PopPop did. So did Mom.

  Now it was my turn.

  Mother’s death brought me right back to my roots. I had been surrounded by imperfect but strong people. No one expected perfection either. Well, Aunt Mimi did, but as Mom always said, “She got radical over there at McSherrystown Academy. Let it fly over your head.” Then she’d pass her hand over her head and say, “Blue Angels.”

  I knew I was imperfect. Plenty of others knew it too, but as PopPop Harmon used to say, “When I can walk on water I’ll let you know.”

  I couldn’t walk on water but I could dance.

  How like Juts, the best dancer I knew!

  Once I passed through the first year without Mom, a time of grief followed by numbness, I was ready to kick up my heels.

  Fate had one more dagger to throw. Straight to the heart.

  71

  A Long Goodbye

  Mother’s ceramic elephants glared at me from the bathroom wall. One was green, one pink and one yellow, and each colored elephant had a matching baby. They made me laugh.

  In a fit of domesticity I decided to take down the old wallpaper in the bathroom. I like paint better than wallpaper but the house, built in the early 1800s, had shifted over the many years, and hairline and not-so-hairline cracks abounded. I had sandpapered and respackled everything in the downstairs but I was losing steam upstairs. Wallpaper covers many sins.

  No wonder Hitler got so evil. Paperhanging can make anyone hateful.

  Throwing caution to the winds, I called a company in town to hang the damn stuff.

  I fretted over the cost but not overlong. Somerset Maugham said, “Life is too short to do the things you can pay other people to do for you.” He was right.

  Jerry and Herb were visiting. For reasons I can’t fathom, some gay men are bathroom queens. When you walk into their bathrooms, tiny crystal chandeliers sparkle overhead, marble washbasins gleam, gold dolphin fixtures beckon—it’s quite an event. Jerry and Herb fell into that category.

  Jerry quickly dispensed with the wallpaper I had chosen,
a restrained vertical stripe, beige on beige. I don’t like patterns much. Stripes or the occasional plaid is it and most times I don’t even want that.

  We spent half the morning ransacking the wallpaper books since the paperhangers would arrive Monday morning.

  Herb wanted a pale pink background with velvet reliefs like escutcheons. I gagged. Jerry wanted an expensive grass covering, one of those woven deals just perfect for cockroaches.

  They fought. I listened. It didn’t matter what they picked because as soon as they got in the car to drive back to Delaware on Sunday night, I’d go back to my chaste vertical stripe and they’d fume the next time they visited.

  Jerry would look at me scathingly. “Dykes have no sense of interior decorating.”

  “Yes, Miss Delaware.” I’d taken to calling him Miss Delaware because he couldn’t get a spot of dirt on him without having the vapors.

  Here we were in the middle of the country, horses in the paddocks—I’d taken in boarders again—cows in the next meadow, enough weeds in the garden to give me fits, and he was in ironed jeans with a crease, Gucci loafers, a maize-colored polo shirt with a turquoise sweater tied around his neck. Oh, the belt was crocodile, of course.

  Six feet four inches of muscle honed to perfection in the gym and I couldn’t get him to saw a hanging limb off my walnut tree.

  As the two of them approached violence over the wallpaper I excused myself to ride a mare I had promised to keep fit for the owner. She was fresh and given to rodeo shows. After ten minutes of her warm-up airs above the ground we settled down to a nice walk on a loose rein. Fortunately, the boys were arguing, for if Jerry had witnessed the spectacle he’d have ranted for an hour about the dangers of equestrian sports, second only to skiing in number of injuries.

  An hour later, when I returned to the house, they had settled on a wallpaper I just had to have. The compromise wallpaper was blue with clipper ships on it. This was an improvement. I said I loved it.

  Jerry picked up the phone and ordered it. Now I had to make up my mind whether to cancel the order when his back was turned or whether to use it because it wasn’t so bad really. I decided to cancel it because Mother’s elephants would be overshadowed by the wallpaper.