She returned from her audition with the ever-threatening migraine at full bore, and sore feet, leaving her in misery from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes.
On seeing how white and strained Mama’s face was, Miz Verlow sent bourbon and ice for her up to our room.
“So thoughtful of her,” Mama said, with her old Alabama accent, and knocked back half a glass at once.
Tears ran down her face as I massaged her feet by candlelight that evening.
“I should have known,” she said. “All these little theatre groups are cliques, talentless cliques. Pass me the ashtray, darling. Those people—classless. They wouldn’t know talent if somebody came in and knocked them over the head with an Oscar.”
Under my fingers, she stretched her toes and flexed her feet and moaned softly.
“Do I look like an understudy to you? I’m supposed to wait in the wings for that mumbling po-faced drip to fall off the stage?” She breathed cigarette smoke at the ceiling. “At least they’re going to do A Streetcar Named Desire next. I am Blanche DuBois. Just look at me.”
Depend upon the kindness of strangers though Mama always had, she was not Blanche DuBois, nor did she manage to wish her rival off the stage of Anastasia. Each time she went to Pensacola for rehearsals, she came back with a migraine and pain in her feet. The night arrived that she could barely walk.
Miz Verlow summoned Dr. McCaskey, who ordered bed rest for Mama. That was the end of Mama’s little theatre career. The migraines let up, and the pain in her feet. When she was on them again, she was summoned by the doctor to have her feet x-rayed. Dr. McCaskey found nothing wrong with Mama’s feet that wearing a larger size shoe would not cure. The diagnosis made Mama furious. She made me swear that if she were on her deathbed, I would never ever call that charlatan.
On the twenty-first of November, smoke billowed over Pensacola. Mama and Miz Verlow and I sat on an overturned skiff on the splat of beach and watched the city docks burn. We could taste the soot in the air. The fire stormed on the docks and vomited lurid smoke and ash, the fire trucks and fireboats keened, the hoses and cannons hurled water onto the flames, and the figures of men, shrunk by distance and the enormity of the fire, looked like imps in the midst of hellfire. The cacophony of sound was hellish too; it seemed to me that if one could hear the caterwauling of the damned, it would sound just so. The water of the bay reflected pillars of flames, reveling and dancing, like a sea of drowned candles.
Forty-two
THE spring and fall bird migrations drew many of our guests. Of the regulars, the Llewelyns were actually among the guests when Mama and I first arrived, but I paid them no mind at the time, and in turn, they paid little to me. Dr. Gwilym Llewelyn was a retired dentist who invited everyone to call him Will. Mrs. Gwilym Llewelyn was quite emphatically Mrs. Llewelyn. Her wifely status emphasized by insisting on being “Mrs. Llewelyn” was a feint; her Christian name was Lou Ellen, and that had proved too much poetry for her.
On their return in the fall of 1958, the Llewelyns remarked on my interest in birds. Their enthusiasm was infectious, their pleasure in the birds so intense and immediate, that I was entirely comfortable with them at once. As soon as they discovered that I was unusually good at mimicry of the birds, they all but adopted me. Dr. Llewelyn insisted on examining my teeth and cleaning them with a little dental kit that he carried with him, and gave me free toothpaste with fluoride in it that probably saved my teeth from the high-sugar diet at Merrymeeting. Mrs. Llewelyn took me shopping with her on occasion, with the excuse that she needed me to carry packages. On those expeditions, she bought me shoes and clothing that fit me, and treated me to lunches and teas in Pensacola or in Milton.
Each Christmas, I sent the Llewelyns a homemade Christmas card with an origami crane in it for them to hang on their tree, and they sent me a store-bought card, half a dozen toothbrushes and a supply of toothpaste, and a calendar. My birthday brought not only a card but a gift, which was always what Mrs. Llewelyn called “frivolous.” Once it was a poodle skirt, with the requisite petticoat to wear under it, so that navigating the aisles at school was like docking a boat. Another birthday, the Llewelyns sent a girlish diary with a flimsy lock and a set of stationery, with stamps and an address book. Their gifts were the commonplace things that my peers were likely to receive from doting grandparents or aunts or uncles, and I always felt a little less of an orphan when I opened them.
From mid-March to June, the beach offered surcease from the northern winter. From June to September, our near-neighbors in the broiling Southern summer sought relief in the relative cool of the beach. Custom slowed a little in October, and fell off through November, December, January and February, but never quite stopped altogether, as guests found their way to Merrymeeting for reasons that had little to do with climate. Even at Thanksgiving and Christmas, which most folk could be expected to observe at home, a few guests took shelter at Merrymeeting. The Llewelyns always departed in time to spend their holidays with family. Mrs. Mank notably never observed the holidays with us.
Of all of Merrymeeting’s guests, the most eccentric assortment were the ones who turned up for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Every year that I can recall, an elderly couple by the name of Slater arrived in the third week of November and stayed until the first day of January. Mrs. Slater loved Bridge. If she could not make up a table, she knitted. Mr. Slater was always looking for someone with whom to play chess or Pinochle. They were both intense competitors, and I often observed them cheating at games. For old people, their reflexes with cards, pins, and knitting needles were astonishing.
An extraordinarily tall, thin, loose-limbed man, Mr. Quigley, was in the habit of arriving the day before Thanksgiving, staying a week, and then returning for a second week at Yuletide. He played Bridge with Mrs. Slater or chess or Pinochle with Mr. Slater. It was my impression that he was also aware that they cheated and was amused to let them. He painted little watercolors, usually seascapes.
Dr. Jean Keeling, a woman much given to reading, spent the last two weeks of December and all of January at Merrymeeting. When she wasn’t reading science-fiction paperback novels, she listened to opera on the Stromberg Carlson, and wrote a great many cards and letters. She played Bridge and other games with the Slaters and was as quick with her cards as they were, but like Mr. Quigley, seemed not to care whether she won or not. She was kind enough to give me her paperbacks when she finished them, but she was not a particularly gregarious person. She had one close friend among the group and that was Father Valentine.
An old blind priest, Father Valentine settled in the first of November and stayed until February fifteen. He was supposedly Episcopalian and retired, but was not the least bit frail. He paid me to read to him by the hour, which vastly improved my reading skills and vocabulary, to say nothing of my knowledge of the Bible, theology and philosophy. Fortunately for me, Father Valentine also enjoyed mystery stories, and through him, I was educated in the canon of fictional crime. He was voluble, not to say indiscreet, in a perfectly forthright way, not the least bit childishly or maliciously.
These guests’ avocations, however, were not what made them our most eccentric guests, nor was it the habit of spending what are normally family holidays at Merrymeeting. It was that they were all adamantly and extremely superstitious, in different ways. They talked and argued about these beliefs as casually as other folks mentioned the weather. It seemed as if someone was always flinging salt over his or her left shoulder or through some other odd little ritual just barely fending off a dire end caused by a seemingly insignificant event.