Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  I read everything: books on house decorations; catalogues on flowers; cookbooks, which I especially enjoy, and like the New York Times, everything that’s fit to print.

  Ida Reeder is the backbone of my house. She was my mother’s housekeeper, and she is among my most faithful and beautiful friends. She does everything almost to perfection—even flower arrangements which my mother taught her to do. Since I have tenants in the house, the job is one that demands a great deal of tact, judgement and diplomacy. Thanks to Ida I’ve never had a bad tenant in all these years. She is a superb cook, and John Huston just called all the way from Ireland, to say that he wanted her fried chicken and potato salad the day he arrives.

  She and John get along marvelously, and when we left Ireland everybody wept: John, Ida, the whole staff. She endeared herself completely to the Irish at St. Clerans, as she does to everybody else.

  Since my mother’s death, she has taken her place for me, and calls me her foster child.

  She concerns herself about me and among her other duties she is my social secretary. She alone remembers the comings and goings of people. She is the one who regulates my daily habits, such as reading and working. Other people come and go, but Ida always remains, and I thank the good Lord for her.

  She is less a housekeeper than a beloved friend, although of course, she’s a marvelous housekeeper too. I know that at any time, wherever she may be, day or night, if I need her she will come.

  I went professionally to Mary Mercer because I was despondent. My mother had died, my dear friend John La Touche had died and I was ill, badly crippled. Several psychiatrists who are social friends of mine, Ernst Hammerschlag and Hilda Bruck and others, had suggested strongly that I go to see Mary Mercer. I resisted just as strongly; not only was the horror of Payne Whitney Hospital still fresh to me (to this day I sometimes think in times of distress, at least I’m not in Payne Whitney) but I resisted psychiatry itself, as I did not accept it as a medical science. The last thing left me, I argued, was my mind, and I was not going to let anyone fiddle with it.

  Dr. Mercer lived in the county and was a specialist for children, I was told. That seemed to let me out. Ida was a firm ally with me. She knew that my sister had been more than a dozen years in psychiatry. Tennessee was in psychiatry and he was all for it. So between Ida and Tennessee I did not sleep very well or many nights.

  I had expected that Dr. Mercer would be ugly, bossy and try to invade my soul’s particular territories. I would have to call her to make an appointment Hilda and Ernst had said. That was one telephone call I delayed and suffered over. Walking with my crutch to the living room, picking up the receiver, putting it down, and going through all the motions except actually calling. Finally, I did call, and in a low, pleasant voice Dr. Mercer made an appointment for me.

  The day before I went to see her I was awake at three o’clock in the morning, and was getting dressed by nine for an eleven o’clock appointment. Ida had tears in her eyes: “Why you’re not crazy, Sister, you’re just depressed because so many awful things have happened these days.”

  So, well before the appointed hour, I was waiting at Dr. Mercer’s office. The screen door was hard for me to manage and almost knocked me down. I was breathless by the time I actually faced Dr. Mercer. She was and is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Her hair is dark, her eyes gray-blue and her skin very fair. She is always impeccably dressed and her slim figure radiates health and grace. She always wears one strand of pearls. Most of all, her face reflects the inner beauty of her noble and dedicated mind.

  I not only liked Dr. Mercer immediately, I loved her, and just as important, I knew I could trust her with my very soul. There was no difficulty in talking to her. All the rebellion and frustration of my life I handed over to her, for I knew that she knew what she was touching. When the fifty-minute session was over, she asked me what I was going to do then.

  “Go home and think things over.”

  “It’s my lunch time,” she said, and to my great surprise and unbounded delight, she asked, “Would you like to join me for lunch?”

  We never mentioned psychiatry at lunch time. We talked of books, but mostly we ate in silence. She had said in our first fifty-minute session, “I love words, but I tell you Mrs. McCullers, I’m not going to be seduced by your words. I’ve seen your play Member of the Wedding, but I’ve not read any of your books. I want it to stay that way, and will not read them until our therapy is finished.” Thereafter after every session we had lunch together, and that was the solace and high point of my day.

  Therapy went marvelously well, and in less than a year, she discharged me as a patient. We have become devoted friends, and I cannot imagine life without our love and friendship.

  There was nothing we did not discuss, even silly things, like the time Herman tried to bite the top of my head. Herman was Gypsy Rose Lee’s monkey. Gypsy had told me she was going to give me a monkey, and I was delighted. I was staying with her for the week-end and I said, “Where’s the monkey?”

  “He’s with his keeper,” she said.

  That should have warned me; a monkey with a keeper was not like the cute monkey I’d expected.

  I began to dry my hair in front of the fireplace, and suddenly this big, tailless ape came into the room. He took one look at my drying hair, and swung on to it.

  “Gypsy!” I hollered. “Take this beast off me!”

  She called the keeper who brought in some bananas. The monkey was still slavering over my head, and I expected the skull bones to crunch at any moment. Finally, he was lured by the goodies and eating them he let me go. For me, that was the end of Herman, and in the fall I bought a boxer pup.

  It was more difficult to discuss Reeves; he was hard to live with and harder to describe.

  Mary, of course, had no way of seeing the shine and beauty of his young days, only I could remember, and then when his beauty passed into a corruption that I clearly had to realize, I could only describe it, helpless to do anything except advise he go to a psychiatrist. From being a man of glory, he descended little by little to forgery, theft and attempted murder.

  Mary understood. She did not think it was romantic when he sneaked onto the Queen Mary and threatened to jump overboard if I wouldn’t take him back. She sensed, as I knew, that we were dealing with a potential murderer as well as a thoroughly dishonest man.

  Hervey Cleckley has written a masterful book called The Mask of Sanity, and in that book I could see Reeves mirrored. Psychopathic people are very often charming. They live on their charm, their good looks and the weaknesses of wives or mothers.

  In psychiatry, I realized the first time I discovered him in a theft. I repeated to Dr. Mercer the episodes of when we had left Fayetteville and moved to a room in New York City, because of the imminent publication of my books, Heart, and then later, the already written Reflections in a Golden Eye. The world should have felt good to me. I had struggled very hard, and at last my work was finished and I could look forward to a month of rest.

  Reeves sold the car which we had no further use for, as he planned to get a job in New York. The morning after, I asked him about the money from the sale and he said he had put it on the dresser table, and that was the last he saw of it. I looked all over the dresser and all the drawers but the money was not to be found. I even went to the landlady and asked if her maids were strictly honest, and she bawled me out. So the first publication of my books was tarnished by Reeves’s dishonesty. At that time we’d been married for four years and I could not believe that he would do evil.

  I had to believe it a few weeks later. As I told her, I had gone to Yaddo to write, and my father called me to ask if I had noticed any irregularity in my bank account. Puzzled, I said no. Then Daddy said a substantial number of checks had been signed by me, and knowing my strict punctiliousness about money the bank wondered if they could possibly be forged. Even though Reeves was dead at this time I felt that I had to describe them to Dr. Mercer to give her a clearer unde
rstanding of me and my relations with Reeves.

  “But you must have had happy times,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “I remember one night we climbed up on the mansard roof of our house just to see the moon. We had good times, and that’s what made it so difficult. If he had been all bad, it would have been such a relief because I would have been able to leave him without so much struggle. And don’t forget, he was of enormous value to me at the time I wrote Heart and Reflections. I was completely absorbed in my work, and if the food burned up he never chided me. More important, he read and criticized each chapter as it was being done. Once I asked him if he thought Heart was any good. He reflected for a long time, and then he said, ‘No, it’s not good, it’s great.’ ”

  APPENDIX

  The Sojourner: Broadcast Transcription

  [Printed below is a transcription of McCullers’s teleplay “The Sojourner” as it was broadcast on CBS television on Sunday, December 27, 1953, as one of three segments of that afternoon’s Omnibus program. The broadcast differed in significant ways from the earlier version of the script by McCullers on pp. 301–319 in this volume. The dialogue presented here is exactly what was spoken during the performance, the only staging of this version of “The Sojourner.” This volume’s editors have added stage directions, given in brackets. They are not meant to represent a comprehensive account of the nonverbal action in the broadcast but are included to provide minimal signposts to clarify characters’ actions not evident from dialogue alone.]

  HOST ALISTAIR COOKE: Our play today, which is about the problems of a young man who lives in one country and has his roots in another, is the first work that’s been done for television by Carson McCullers. It has been staged by Mel Ferrer and David Wayne is the star, and Miss McCullers calls it “The Sojourner.”

  *

  [Interior of JEANNINE’s living room in Paris. FERRIS reads a newspaper while VALENTIN cuts paper dolls.]

  VALENTIN: But you said you would take me to see the puppets in the Tuileries.

  FERRIS: Can’t make it today, Butch. I’m beat.

  VALENTIN: Why do you call me Butch, Mr. Ferris?

  FERRIS: I don’t know. You don’t much look like a Butch.

  VALENTIN: What does a Butch look like? You promised twice to take me to see the puppets. This is the third time.

  FERRIS: I’ll take you another week. I’m reading.

  VALENTIN: Are there parks in America?

  FERRIS: Of course.

  VALENTIN: Are there dogs and cats and children? Are there fishes? Are there dogs and cats and fishes and trees in America?

  FERRIS: Don’t be silly.

  VOICE OF JEANNINE: He’s going through this silly stage. I tried to call you this morning, Johnny.

  FERRIS: Oh, I forgot to tell you, I’m moving.

  VOICE OF JEANNINE: Moving? Why? Where?

  FERRIS: From the Port-Royal to the Scribe. From a hotel with a bad cable service to a hotel with a worse one. Jeannine, I’m so sick of moving from one place to another. So fed up with walls of rented rooms, with public meals.

  VOICE OF JEANNINE: You don’t have to live that way, mon petit chou. It’s always been up to you, you know.

  Oh, by the way, a cable came this afternoon. Valentin, Nanny put it in her kitchen box. Go fetch it for Mr. Ferris like a good boy.

  VALENTIN [as he walks off]: Dogs and cats and fishes and trees. Dogs and cats and fishes and trees . . .

  FERRIS (VOICE-OVER): It’s always been up to you. Has it? I suppose so. But how, in what way, I don’t know. Confusion, always confusion. Autumn memory, the women I’ve loved, the cities I’ve lived in. New York, and Elizabeth, and all the glow of the early days, the foolish beautiful wedding, the waking up together and the believing. And then the divorce. Rome—never mind her name—all finished. The splash of fountains, the old Roman streets, the golden, lavish city of blossoms and age-soft stone. And then she two-timed me. Paris now, another city I dreamed about as a boy, and Jeannine, and Jeannine’s son. Take me to the Tuileries. Dogs and cats and fishes and trees. Responsibility. It’s always been up to you.

  [VALENTIN enters and hands paper with the cable message to FERRIS, who begins to unfold it.]

  FERRIS: What are you staring at?

  VALENTIN: I’m waiting to see how it reads. It’s from America.

  [FERRIS fully unfolds paper.]

  VOICE OF JEANNINE: What is it, Johnny? Bad news?

  FERRIS: My father died early yesterday afternoon.

  VOICE OF JEANNINE: Oh, Johnny, I’m so sorry.

  FERRIS: I’ll try and catch the eight o’clock plane.

  VALENTIN: Are you coming back?

  FERRIS: It gets me in near noon tomorrow.

  VALENTIN: Are you coming back?

  *

  [Onscreen, an airplane in flight.]

  FERRIS (VOICE-OVER): Travel is change, everything is change. One hotel to another, one city to another, one love to another. Love has no geography. Time has no latitude, no longitude. And death, secretly step by step, travels toward us every day. And I am transient and afraid. But what am I afraid of? Change, of experience, or is it responsibility?

  *

  [FERRIS and MOTHER enter the study in the family’s house after the funeral. MOTHER takes off her veil and places it on a chair.]

  FERRIS: Why don’t you lie down, Mother, you look so tired.

  MOTHER: The rain has torn down more of the autumn leaves. The trees will soon be bare.

  FERRIS: I wonder why it always seems to rain at funerals.

  MOTHER: So many of your father’s old friends were there, people I’d never seen before. I do think the Twenty-third Psalm was the right one, don’t you, darling?

  FERRIS: I got a letter from Dad just ten days ago. He seemed so well, so cheerful.

  MOTHER: It was Sunday, a lovely autumn day, with clear green sky, no wind at all. In the afternoon, directly after lunch, he said he was going down to prune the rose bushes, put the garden to sleep for the winter.

  FERRIS: The time he spent in that garden.

  MOTHER: Around five o’clock I went out to him.

  FERRIS: Please Mother, don’t talk about it now.

  MOTHER: He looked so tired. I took the shears from him and asked him to go in with me. And then something happened that will make me happy for the rest of my days. He suddenly said, “Mother, you’re the best and the most beautiful wife in the world. Every day for forty-one years I’ve thought how blessed I am”—and he kissed me. [She has been speaking with emotion, and at “me” her voice breaks. She wipes her eyes.]

  FERRIS: Forty-one years—

  MOTHER: I . . . put him to bed and made him a toddy. He always enjoyed his toddy in the late afternoon. I went downstairs to make supper. While I was in the kitchen I heard a sound. It was a small sound, but I had a premonition, I suppose. I rushed upstairs. His glass had fallen. When I looked at him, he was dead.

  FERRIS: Please, Mother.

  MOTHER: He loved you so.

  FERRIS: I know.

  FERRIS: Sit down, Mother. [Leads her to chair and helps her sit down.] Remember how we used to go hunting? The B.B. gun he bought me on my eighth birthday, the shotgun when I was twelve. We used to get up early on hunting days. We’d tiptoe downstairs so as not to wake you up.

  MOTHER [smiling]: I heard you every time.

  FERRIS: Did you?

  MOTHER: Usually I’d just smile and go right back to sleep.

  FERRIS: Dad would cook a pot of oatmeal, or maybe some sausages on the kitchen stove. The dog would come in wet.

  MOTHER: Daisy?

  FERRIS: Yeah, Daisy. There was a peculiar smell of wet dog mixing with the smells of breakfast. At that hour everything seemed somehow . . . poetic, I guess you’d say. It was as if Dad and I shared a secret, a marvelous secret no one could name.

  MOTHER: The secret was love, John. He was talking of you that last Sunday, wondering if you would ever settle down, and if you would marry again. [FERRIS rises and qui
ckly goes to pour himself a drink.] John, oh Johnny boy, what did happen between you and Elizabeth?

  FERRIS: Oh, a hundred little things, a hundred little incidents. It’s hard to explain. Maybe it was one thing mainly. Elizabeth wanted so much to have a child. She waited and hoped, and at first she thought it was her failure. And then it turned out that . . . turned out that I’ve . . .

  MOTHER: Darling . . . Your father and I never understood. You and Elizabeth always seemed happy when you came to visit us, but we realized there’s an invisible wall around a marriage that shuts off all outsiders, no matter how dear.

  FERRIS: Invisible wall. [A short pause.] Elizabeth married shortly after we were divorced.

  MOTHER: Is she happy, John?

  FERRIS: I haven’t seen her. Apparently—they’ve been married some time, and they have two children. I’ve been meaning to tell you something. I may be married again.

  MOTHER: Oh Johnny, nothing could make me happier! What is she like?

  FERRIS: Well, she’s French, she’s a singer. She sings in a Paris nightclub.

  MOTHER: Your father and I have never been narrow-minded about artists and the stage.

  FERRIS: And she’s been divorced.

  MOTHER: So have you, darling.

  FERRIS: But you see . . . [He walks to table at back of the room.]

  MOTHER: There’s something more about this girl in Paris. Tell me about it.

  FERRIS: She was married to an Englishman. She has a little boy. I’m worried. Mother, I’m afraid. My . . . my life has been so mixed up, I’m afraid of mixing up that little boy.