Roses in the Rain

Chapter 17

The Ball Begins to Unravel

 

What kind of marriage relationship did Mother and Daddy enjoy—or endure? Did she really and truly love him for himself? She certainly admired Daddy’s fine mind, his intellectual acuity. Daddy was well informed on economic, political, and social issues of the day. People listened to him and respected his opinions. He held an almost god-like, yet childlike, standing in the family, an extraordinary privilege in the community, like all his brothers—doctors and lawyers.

Although my parents maintained separate bedrooms, to all outward appearances they got along well. They were companionable, working together as partners and caretakers of the place, as well as parents to us girls. Daddy was the demonstrative one with hugs and sweet talk, nearly endless patience and good humor. When he came home from work, she waited “in the wings” as we girls ran to him with loud cries of joy. “Daddy home!” Once Mother settled us down and sent us off to play, they relaxed in the living room—he seated in his Morris rocker with a whiskey glass of Old Granddad, she in her slender rocking chair and her tall glass of iced tea—as they reviewed the day’s events.

Often, they tossed ideas and opinions through the kitchen pass-through window into the dining room, she working at the sink under the window, he at his place at the table on the other side. And they argued, seemingly civilly, until she’d remark, “My stars, Herschel! Have you lost your marbles?”

Virginia Woolf once wrote, in To the Lighthouse: “He turned and saw her. Ah! She was lovely, lovelier now than ever he thought. But he could not speak to her. He would not interrupt her . . . She was aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness . . . it hurt him that she should be so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing to help her.” Somehow I sensed Daddy longed to be loved by his beautiful, temperamental wife. Instead, she criticized him and cuckolded him.

I’ve often wondered if she may have had a “lover” or at least a platonic relationship. Sometimes she’d catch the city bus to meet a “friend” downtown to see a Lana Turner matinee. I never was invited because “you’re too young.” Of course; I was only ten, my little sister, three.

One of their friends, a breeder of white German Shepherds, often called on Mother while Daddy was at work downtown. One time this man brought Mother a box of Whitman’s chocolates. That seemed innocent enough to me, yet—as all children do—I could sense something not quite right.

Another time, he delivered one of his puppies Daddy had bought. Daddy named the pup “Jim Dandy” after the brand for chicken feed. “Jim” turned out to be a “jimdandy of a dog,” as he not only developed into a wonderful watch dog for the place, a guard dog for us young girls, but our constant companion who followed us everywhere we went.

I recall a terrible row one bright summer day. Daddy yelled. Mother shrieked. Back and forth they went at it, through the dividing window. My sister, Alice, and I knew something dreadful was up, we didn’t know what. We slipped outside and stood under the scuppernong arbor and plucked grapes still green. We wondered and questioned, aloud, not even whimpering, just stunned.

Finally Alice asked me, “Are they getting a divorce?”

“I don’t know.”

“What will happen to us?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“If they do, and we have to choose, which one would you choose to stay with?” I don’t recall whom Alice chose, but I didn’t hesitate making a decision. I wonder now if she remembers the incident. Nothing ever came of it. Perhaps she was having some sort of nervous breakdown. At any rate, I seem to recall that one of her migraine headaches flared up from the emotional pressure brought on by her rage, sending her to bed in her darkened room for days.

Eventually, our lives settled down. They never divorced.

Years later, as an adult, I talked to Uncle George (Daddy’s older brother and my godfather) who intimated something vague, telling me only that there “are things you don’t know, and you’ll never know because I won’t tell you.”

Yet, after Daddy died, Mother told me that he was her Everyman—husband, best friend, lover, brother, father. She asked me if he really loved her. I hastened to reassure her that, of course, he did. Daddy had once told me that, when I asked him who was head of our house, he was the head but Mother was the neck that turned the head—rather an apt metaphor for their marriage, I suppose.

Daddy was an affectionate, loving and demonstrative man. He lavished his attention on all of us. Hugs came easily for him. Compliments for one thing or another rolled off his lips effortlessly, as well as twinkling blue eyes sending silent messages of admiration, approval, and encouragement. Mother’s usual response was, “Are you sure?” She acquiesced to his loving with a closed-fisted arm wrap.

In 1959, certain events catapulted America onto television sets around the world. On the second day of January, the space craft “Luna I”—a/k/a Mechta E-1 No.4 and First Lunar Rover—shot off toward the vicinity of the moon, the first ever to do so. The word “astronaut” was added to the lexicon. Flash Gordon was no longer mere fiction. Alaska and Hawaii were accepted into the Union as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states, respectively while at Florida’s back door, Fidel Castro marched his guerrilla army into Havana, overthrew President Baptista, announced himself premier of Cuba, and declared his Cuban Revolution a success. All Cuban trade through the Port of Pensacola abruptly ceased. It was the first incursion of Communism in the Western Hemisphere.

That same year, Pensacola launched a year-long celebration of the city’s founding in 1559 to commemorate its quadra-centennial of Don Tristan de Luna’s landing on Santa Rosa Island. The hit movie at Saenger’s on Palafox Street that summer was The Fly. At Walgreens’ lunch counter, a quarter paid for a king-sized lemonade with a scoop of orange sherbet. And a young naval pilot named John Sidney McCain III faced the biggest challenge of his twenty-two years. Nobody had ever heard of him back then, but he was a man with a mission: to land his aircraft on the Pensacola-based USS Antietam as it steamed and heaved in the swells of the Gulf of Mexico. He succeeded.

In May, my sweet grandmother, Mama Nedley, died peacefully in her bed after a long period of decline and semi-coma consciousness. How I would have loved to brush out her long white hair still tinged with pale blonde strands at age eighty-two. I would have braided it for her or pulled it up into her usual topknot secured with old-fashioned hair pins. I would have patted lavender water on her still smooth cheeks, massaged Jergen’s lotion on her hands and feet.

I wanted to fetch the silk bouquet of pink “Sweetheart” rose buds that Papa had given her years before and pin it onto her dressing gown, draped across the foot of her bed. She used to wear it pinned onto a navy polka dot dress from an Easter long ago, perhaps the same dress she wore to Mother and Daddy’s wedding. I wanted to open her old Book of Common Prayer and read aloud the Morning and Evening prayer services to her. As it was, Sis performed those little ministrations when she came over from Mobile for a lengthy stay.

Mother assigned all the drudgery chores to me—changing bed linens, scrubbing down the plastic mattress cover and the Porta-Potty beside the bed, mopping the linoleum floors. Then she sent me right back over to our house and my regular dishwashing and homework, denying me any meaningful time alone with my soul-mate grandmother in her final hours.

Mama’s body was transported to Apalachicola for the funeral at Trinity Episcopal Church, followed by burial beside Papa in Magnolia Cemetery in the woods near the river. Jerry and Max drove all the way over from Texas, stopping by our place only briefly. Daddy drove Sis and Frank over, while Mother stayed home. She didn’t do funerals. Of course, she didn’t allow either of us girls to go, either, but forced us go on to school, anyway. “No excuses,” she insisted.

That June I graduated with my classmates. Neither Mother nor Daddy attended. My best friend Pat’s family squeezed me into their car for the drive to the Municipal Auditorium for the ceremony. Instead of participating in the graduation dance afterwards, I attended a private supper party another friend had invited me to in a banquet room overlooking Pensacola Bay. It was a lovely evening with an arranged date—my friend’s older brother.

Much of that summer of 1959, Daddy was not well. He could eat only soft bland foods because of an esophageal stricture. He complained that his legs hurt and he had to sit down a lot more. Many sunny afternoons he rested in one of the old Adirondack chairs on the southwest corner of Mama’s now empty house, overlooking the huge fig tree. I often sat at his feet, resting my head on his knees, conversing with him, listening to him, asking him questions as he tried to impart what were to become his final words of wisdom. I think he knew his time was coming. He often quoted John 14 to me:

In my Father’s house are many mansions.

I asked, “How do you know?”

If it were not so, I would have told you.

He talked about the millions of galaxies and zillions of planets in them. Could they not be those mansions? The word “mansion” connotes a large living space, not just a house, certainly not a cottage. That was his concept, and I ask myself now, “Why, not?”

He continued with, I go to prepare a place for you . . . Little did I realize what he meant by that statement, or that he was desperate to prepare me for what was to come soon. I have recalled that particular conversation many times. And he urged me, “Try to get along with your mother. Every girl needs a mother.”

But he was my soul mate.

On July 19^th, my birthday, he became so sick he couldn’t get up. Mother telephoned Dr. White, our old faithful physician and friend. In those days, physicians still made house calls, even out to the country, especially when patients were too sick or frail to be brought in to town. He came right out, examined Daddy, and immediately called an ambulance. He asked Mother which hospital, and she replied, “I guess our old reliable Sacred Heart.”

The third night there, Daddy suffered a myocardial infarction—a cardiac event in the heart muscle itself—the classic heart attack. That was Wednesday. He lingered long enough for many of the Dame family to gather around, driving or taking the Greyhound bus from Jacksonville, Fort Pierce, Bradenton, Winter Park. I visited as often during the days as I could “escape” on the city bus. We talked very little. His breaths were short and shallow.

On Sunday morning, August 2^nd, he asked me to fetch a newspaper for him, but he was too weak to hold it up. He asked me to read all the headlines on the front page, then to read the sports page, so I struggled over a language I had heard only over radio broadcasts of baseball games. “Read the stats,” he whispered, indicating the statistics of batting averages, wins, losses, comparing the American League with the Nationals. I tried. “That’s enough,” he gasped.

I stood by his side all that day, murmuring to him, stroking his forehead, spooning a vanilla pudding to his mouth, moistening his dried lips with a special salve a nurse brought me, as his voice trembled, “Oh me,” then inhaled.

“Oh my . . . Oh me . . .” Sometimes, he added, “Oh mo,” in a weak attempt to cheer me up. I could see that he was failing quickly, naïve and unschooled in medicine as I was at only eighteen. When Uncle George brought Mother for the evening hours, with Alice in tow, Mother sent me home, presumably to answer the telephone if it rang. I forget who drove me home, as the city buses stopped running at night. I think Uncle George sent me in a taxi cab. At the time, I didn’t realize that was the last time I would see my Daddy alive. I never said good-bye, just as I hadn’t to my grandmother.

Home alone, I needed to mark this occasion as though I already knew, while not knowing consciously, that Daddy was dying. His Morris platform rocker in the front corner of the living room glowed with light, almost as though he had come to bid me farewell. I stood next to his upright Philco radio, twisting dials, looking for music, something grand and tragic, like one of the Verdi operas that he loved so much. All I could find was Leroy Anderson performing jolly Broadway hits.

I didn’t want jolly.

I telephoned the hospital and asked for Daddy’s room number. Uncle George picked up.

“How is he?”

“Not good,” Uncle George responded after a brief pause. “Not good.”

Late that night, Mother returned home, wearing dark glasses. She began fetching Daddy’s things from the green Oldsmobile and handing them to me.

“Take these inside,” she ordered me.

“Why?”

“Just do it!

My older half-sister, Dorothy, getting out from the other side of the car, told her, “You may as well tell her, Harriette.”

Mother snapped, “He doesn’t need them anymore.”

I was puzzled at first, then it hit me: he didn’t need them because he was dead. He had breathed his last just as I had called the hospital.

I screamed at her. I berated her for sending me away without allowing me to say some sort of “good-bye.” I accused her of hiding him away from me instead of bringing him home to die here with me kneeling at his feet, my head on his knees.

To say I was devastated is to put it banally. To lose the one parent who truly loved me, emotionally and intellectually and psychologically, and whom I loved more than I can express in words, was beyond what I could bear. But to have been kept home alone that final evening after spending all day with him, to be told absolutely nothing, to have to figure things out for myself was simply unconscionable.

Where was my young sister all this time? I really can’t remember. She told me, years later, that she recalls wearing shorts and flimsy flip flops, and sitting alone on cold stone steps of the staircase leading down from Daddy’s floor, and that eventually a Sister of Mercy found her and sat down beside her. She was only eleven years old. Neither of us knew how to grieve. And neither of us was allowed to attend the funeral in Homerville, Georgia, the Dame Family seat since colonial era ancestors left Virginia in the early 1800s.

Mother simply didn’t do funerals. Uncle George, blessed autocrat that he was, put his foot down and insisted over Mother’s loud protestations that I, at least, be taken to Homerville. And so Dorothy, my much older half-sister from Daddy’s first marriage, helped me pack. I had no idea what would be appropriate, just nice things in my closet. She drove me herself. The next day she took me shopping, partly to distract me, mostly to buy me a simple black dress for the funeral. She told me a black dress always comes in handy for a young woman. She lent me a pair of pearl earrings. My black flats would be all right, she decided, with sheer stockings, not socks.

The rest of that summer and into the fall, what there was left of family life all but disintegrated. The ball of purple yarn had unraveled.

“In its place,” as Virginia Woolf wrote in one of her essays, “a dark cloud settled over us; we seemed to sit all together cooped up, sad, solemn, unreal, under a haze of heavy emotion. It seemed impossible to break through. It was not merely dull; it was unreal. A finger seemed laid on one’s lips. . . . [Moreover, no one ever] mentioned its unbecoming side; its legacy of bitterness, bad temper, ill adjustment; and what is to me the worst of all—boredom” (Moments of Being, “A Sketch of the Past”).

Mother pretty much locked herself in her bedroom. My sister and I formed our own private nucleus into which we could shelter ourselves and nurse our emotional wounds.

I don’t remember any formal “reading of the will” in those months following Daddy’s death. When I asked Mother about it, she said that Daddy had left everything to her, outright. Were my sister and I to come into any inheritance when we reached the age of majority—twenty-one? I’ll never know.