MOMMA hadn’t spoken to her three older sisters for nearly sixteen years. They lived not two blocks from us. In a town the size of Falls, you know when somebody’s cutting you dead. The sisters occupied their birthplace, the inherited McCloud homeplace, one twice the size of our excess house. This one had gables atop gables, a garden house big as Shirley’s whole home, and it all needed paint. The only garden was whatever perennials sliced through ivy and high weeds.
My aunts—like lots of folks who live together from birth till old age—had divided up who to be. They were each good at different-type emotions—they respected one another’s territory. You couldn’t quite think of them as separate, more like three plants sprung from one pot—root-bound, leaf-entwined hybrid ivies maybe.
The three girls had loved one boy. He’d gone off to college up North, he’d come back sick, he’d published one poem in The Atlantic Monthly while studying at Cambridge. The poem, my mother said, a little high-handed, was about spring—how everything looked bleak and bare till your buds came and your birds got back from Florida—not all that original.
The poet signed his work with his middle name only, Randall. He had ghost-colored skin, he drooped across furniture, looking boneless. The sisters played piano for him constantly. My stern Scottish grandpoppa didn’t like artistes. Grampa Angus McCloud had turned into a gruff old self-made stiff. His opinions were writ large as the handlebar mustache he oiled and nursed. He was one of those men of the day who bragged on his four girls’ purity, men who ofttimes managed to keep the virgin bevy a few rooms away throughout men’s long old age. If it hadn’t been for Momma’s train wreck, Angus McCloud might’ve had a perfect track record. Ten years before my pop turned up, Granddad worked to discourage Randall, beloved by the oldest three girls. Randall—when finally pressed about which adoring sister he would marry—got tactful: his color improved and then, roses in his cheeks, the poor boy died of consumption at age twenty-three. Randall had no aptitude for marriage.
My Granddad figured his grieving girls would finally, as he said, “brranch out.” But the three sisters formed a kind of permanent memorial fan club. They copied all the poet’s work in fancy script, they made the first letter of each page sprout birds and flowers and gold-leafed tree limbs. Their music room was soon plastered with Randall’s ditties, framed. Grandpoppa kept bringing young men home. He imported Scotsmen to manage his indigo works outside Wilmington. Such boys got invited to dinner. The sisters quoted Randall to all comers. Girls offered to play guests a piano setting of Randall’s famous Atlantic poem, “O, Awakening Bud—A Young Man’s April Reverie” by “Randall.” Grandpoppa couldn’t forgive his oldest girls their taste in gents, dead ones. He came to favor his youngest child, Baby Bianca. She’d been eleven when Randall—after tinting hankies red for two months—perished. To Bianca, he won’t no dashing poet, just the One That Coughs. Her older sisters thrived on their shared moods, hunches, poetry, piano music, “issues of the day,” which they debated with a skill that impressed then scared young Glasgow boys from the indigo works.
Bianca’s second accident involved the train. Then she’d had enough bad luck and good. She retired to her porch with her new husband. And though Poppa McCloud disapproved of Bianca’s crude new spouse, the old man preferred a living gent to that cult the other three had built around one sissy ghost. So when old Angus died, he left my momma everything except the homeplace. Locals cried unfair. Everybody seemed outraged except my momma and the three sisters theirselves.
After Momma accepted every last family cent, she ceased speaking to her unwed sisters, not the other way around. Ever after, the sisters earned their meager keep by teaching piano to all girls from your Summit Avenue families.—My own poppa would slip the sisters envelopes stuffed with cash at Christmas, Easter, and on the anniversary of the Poet’s death (the Ides of March, as it happened, a coincidence the classics-minded ladies found fitting).
Like me, Poppa visited them often but always by the servants’ entrance at the back of the mansion. It wouldn’t do for Momma to find out. It’d only hurt her feelings for no reason. The generous sisters considered Poppa “droll” and “original.” They taught him things. When he confessed to having a Harvard intelligence in a Burgaw County body, aunts nodded total straight-faced sympathy. Poppa said Harvard might’ve happened to him if he’d been born in Falls, not on the outskirts of Bear Grass. “I’m sure you’d have done superbly at our Randall’s college,” the oldest sister said. Poppa got still with the pleasure and his eyes narrowed as he picked at his once callused palm. “Thank you. You can’t imagine … how I … thank you for that.”
THOUGH the three well-bred McCloud sisters looked alike and spoke only kindly of each other, their piano-teaching techniques varied a good bit. Their many students never knew from lesson to weekly lesson which sister would sit waiting at which Steinway. The three’s idea of top-notch poetry seemed right unanimous (Randall’s was). But the ladies’ notion of what they called the ex-quisite in music, why that rambled all over, child. Their differences made for troubles in a pupil’s learning. The differences caused fear. One week, the youngest of the three McClouds would tell you to play more dreamy-like: “Think of moonlight on a lake and let your fingers find that glimmering just under the ivory, dear.” Next week, you arrived with your practice piece all moon-sopped. But the dreamy sister was on the wane upstairs with one of her sick stomachaches and in her place you’d find the next-oldest, who just loved pedal work. She wore felt slippers (a Indian chief on each—though nobody liked to say they’d seen eighty more like these at the Woolworth’s). She would scold you for ignoring the drama of foot dynamics. The thrill of swells and mutes, surges and hushes—“Think North Atlantic, child. Wake up and live. Become la Mer, toujours la Mer!’ Your playing feels so … inland. A farm pond. Flow, child, crash, exult.”
And, of course, darling, the next week, a pupil would turn up with a seasick foot-stomp version only to find the eldest, grimmest, and most technical sister bone-cracking on the bench. She ignored all comparisons with water. She hated the new murky French music that her younger frailer sister swooned to. When folks asked her opinion of Mr. Debussy, she’d slowly say, “Algae.” She admitted she “worshipped at the altar of the Germans.” As a child, when my momma called Mr. Bizet superior to Wagner, this sister laughed, took up the little soapy white busts of Handel and Gounod off her Steinway grand and primly threw them Momma’s way.
Pupils found her waiting, a varnished ruler in hand. When a student knuckle wandered to a wrong note, that knuckle soon knew it. Her pet line was: “Imprecision is Immorality.” These three ladies charged competitive rates, held recitals twice a year. My aunts were said to be the very peak of a local musical education.
Townsfolk called them Lake, Sea, and Ruler—behind their backs. And though generations of children had dreaded walking up the weedy garden path, through huge boxwoods (smelling of cat box), and on to the front room to find (Lady or Tiger like) one of the three, nobody knew better. Piano technique was considered another needed part of a young girl’s hygiene.
Lake, Sea, and Ruler acted very sweet to me, their only niece. In fact, this is how decent they were: They never forced one lesson my way. The colder my momma treated them, the more they offered me raw benefit of the doubt. I always felt welcome in their place. I was hardly the perfect little lady (not at all like the Emily Saiterwaites you always saw traipsing, blanched, into their parlor weekday afternoons). But the sisters kindly compared me with the adored poet. Like him, they claimed, I was, yes, a wee bit red in tooth and claw, but underneath serene, accomplished secretly. I accepted this. I felt glad to have one house where nobody didn’t correct my talk or manners. I brought friends to meet them, Shirley inclusive.
Aunts listened to my tales of climbing through two miles of underground ditch pipe. Or scrambling to the tops of dangerous swaying elm trees during lightning storms. How a person can bring salamanders, unknown to her mother, in a bucket to live under a person?
??s bed. They stared and nodded with open admiration. “So like … Randall,” one would finally say. They seemed to think their poet had passed, gene-free, into me. Only they had seen his outdoorsy ruffian side. They remembered how, after “nature walks,” quests for “material,” the author of “O, Awakening Bud” collapsed in their reception parlor. Sticky mud and burred seeds would be glommed to Randall’s tweedy legs—like the world was something that a poet had to roll around in, personally becoming a sort of breaded veal cutlet of the spirit.
I begged Ma to forgive her sisters. I asked what their big crime had ever been. “Pretension, complete silliness, and the scent of martyrdom they trail everywhere. As children, they were a club, baby nuns, I was never invited to join. They seemed to always pity me whenever I made any small fingering mistake. They whispered. When I practiced piano, they all sat in the next room, with their eyes closed and the draperies drawn, sighing—audibly. They once admitted, listening to me decided them on all becoming teachers. No, you cannot imagine being baby sister to that. Them learning German hours on end and giggling over some irregular verb form. Lucille? You’re so lucky to be an only child.”
But Momma herself had helped to turn Lake, Sea, and Ruler into local saints. Finally I understood that the crime, if there was one, rested mostly with Ma. She might, at the reading of the will, have handed a fair share of the booty to the mild older girls. Instead, Momma honored her poppa’s wishes, and had taken all. Now, nearly sixteen years later, she could not forgive how, without one whimper, the threesome had sat right there and let her rob them of their birthright. So she ceased speaking to or seeing them. At church or on the street, Momma would do a U-turn to avoid the ladies in matching paisley shawls all calling after her (Lake, Sea, and Ruler’s tone—two parts liquid, one part solid), “Lovely day, sister. You look so well, sister.”
Their separate voices could be sharp. But when the three spoke together, their pooled sound—to nobody’s surprise—was not just musical, but music.
6
BY NOW Shirley, our audience and favorite, slept over twice a week. Poppa really tried to keep his calluses to hisself but it was never easy. If he admired Shirl’s naturally yellow hair by touching it, if he invited my pal to just come settle on his lap a second, Momma would dart into the parlor, clear her throat. “Samuel, I believe young Shirley here feels properly welcomed without these extras. Don’t you, Shirley?”
Shirl sighed, nodded, hopped clear of Pop’s grasp. Fiddling with her hem, she stood there, a girl ringed with lace the way a tree-trunk wears its years.
Pop still eyed her, winking a comic tic. “Old Shirley Goodness and Mercy is okay in my book. Ain’t like certain other hoity-toilets little girls I could name on this street. Noses held so danged high they’d get drowned in a April shower. Shirl hain’t no snob.”
Momma straightened inside a legislature of whalebone.
Even her voice sounded corseted: “Samuel, any person who’d come this frequently to the home of a person so ignorant of our mother language must be, by nature, a forgiving Christian girl. At least young Shirley here speaks properly.—I hope some of it wears off on you over there, Miss Lucille Slang.”
I made a grumpy face, then laughed.
SOME WARM nights during lightning storms, I heard my folks pacing the hallway carpet outside my room. I felt honored. I believed they guarded me from lightning. I pictured a blazing stick figure—white-hot zigzags, light for its blood—come to fry or kidnap me. I imagined them fighting him off using the brass umbrella stand or a huge pink wedding-present vase kept out there. But, listening, I found: Momma was secretly petrified of electric storms. Sure, she joked about it, acted real ashamed, but (at first flash) she always hurried to my hall, the only one without a window. Pop rose with her, in his nightshirt, never sounding cross. They had their good talks then. I could see the candle come and go under my door’s seam. I used to feel spooked of big gales till I found that Momma feared them. Then it seemed she was being scared for the both of us. Through my keyhole, I had seen my folks holding hands while pacing. To keep Mom’s mind off death by fireballs, Poppa teased and imitated townsfolk. She would sometimes sit in a side chair and coach him. “More wrists,” she’d say. They squabbled like brother and sister, I decided, but being a only child, I could just guess.
Some windy nights I let their voices stay a murmur that lulled me off towards sleepyland. But whenever Shirl got mentioned, I sat up big-eyed. Blue light crackled everywhere, it showed me my staying-over friend curled just one bed away.
Momma, agitated by thunder, pitched into my pal again, Momma said she’d send Shirl packing if it wouldn’t make me think of her all the more. “Lucille will get over this craze. Those two are seeing entirely too much of each other. Our baby has yet to notice how her Shirley cuts the other poor children point-blank dead. Oh, Shirley’s gotten quite grand since she’s been coming here learning her forks. You’d think we had adopted her.”
Then I couldn’t hear: they’d got to the hall’s furtherest end. On turning back, Pop pointed out how a fellow had to own the horse before he can rent it—he claimed a stablekeeper makes a decent living. Pop again called Shirl good company for me, like a sister. “This Shirley,” Momma started bold—then lowered her tone (first sign she knew my friend slept one thin door away), “Miss Shirley … will forever act nicest to the richest person presently acting nice to Shirley. You forget my childhood, Samuel. Two upstairs play parlors stocked with beautiful wax dolls. Any girl for a hundred miles would’ve risked positive hellfire to get her hands on those. They were cold as dead babies, those wax things. I so loathed them. They all looked swollen. How often some little visiting pest would say hello to sisters and me downstairs then bolt to our four furnished dollhouses. Oh, I know whereof I speak. We shall simply give Lucille’s pet enough rope, enough leash. She’ll do the rest. Outright banishment would be a tactical faux pas. Even I see that.”
Pop claimed she was wrong about Shirl, adding, “I know. I got eyes.”
“That, dearest, is your problem. Remember: ‘For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; / Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’ Do you recall that, Samuel?”
His voice went deadpan. “What, have I been talking in my sleep again?”
They tussled. I saw candlelight flicker as she laughed her strained locked laugh. The storm was grumbling itself still. Back to bed they gossiped, happy. My door’s sash went yellow to pinkish to brown to black again.
“Shirl?” I asked, praying she’d slept through Momma’s insults. I heard only easy breathing. When my friend shifted under sheets, this new wave reached me: a milky smell she had about her. To me it seemed the scent of health itself.
POPPA’S parents were like I am now: too old to care, too mean to quit. They still lived in boggy suburban Bear Grass. They hoarded his letters but never sent him mail—owing to their not being able to sign nothing but X’s. They each had a different style of X: their signature. Pop felt he had to visit them every few years minimum. Mother’s more refined parents had died. “They would,” Daddy said. “Never really liked it here anyways. Hated me on sight. They were grateful for what I’d done, rescuing their beauty and all. They knew she’d twisted my arm into marrying her. Before meeting the McClouds, I went out, bought a new suit of clothes, everything. Combed my hair, the works. I walk in and—setting in these big wing chairs—they both take one look at me and they just groan. Literal. I call old Daddy Angus aside, I tell him I don’t like it one little bit, him grunting at first sight of me. He liked me for talking back at him, nobody usually did.—Yeah, Lucy mine, for your momma’s folks, the population of this world was way too huge, too unselect-like. Now, if the earth had maybe only about thirty-five people on it, why her folks would’ve liked it here. That’d mean they were chosen-like. McClouds! But rabbits and gnats got to live here, too. If bugs got breath, what good was it? They’d be ex-clusive. They checked out.”
If Poppa liked making jokes about his perished in-
laws (whose cash he lived on), he said little about his own folks. He hated how they’d whipped him when he was little. Still, the man was so embarrassed, he couldn’t admit it. We packed a huge picnic lunch. Bidding my bye-byes to Shirley, I cried and so did she. Momma, bored with such extremes, said, “Honestly,” for miles. Poppa made us come, Momma and me. Going home for visits, Poppa said, it’s something nobody should have to do alone.
Momma had taught me how to read. She loved to hear my voice sound everything out. In our buggy, I worked through a novel she’d brought, one of her English ones (governess comeuppance), one written by a Mrs. Something. I squinted with the dust. It took four days to find a damp bulrushy county where Pop was onct born. Red-winged blackbirds rode dried reeds, singing their fair knifing little songs. The swampier that land got, the nearer we drew, Pop grew quieter (for him), then silent as anybody.
As we pulled over the county line, countryside seemed to go stiller and the roads got worse. Up ahead you’d see a little crossroads store, and after so many weedy miles you looked forward to the sight of two faces and some tin signs advertising poultices, cigarettes. The store was boarded shut and you felt sadder for counting on it. Soon we passed ramshackle farm huts and—having heard our buggy—people waited by the roadside for us.
Nodding, they seemed to recognize Poppa though he’d been gone fifteen years. Folks went running back into the hut with news. We heard a woman shout mush-mouthed to somebody inside, “Momma, come quick. It’s that durn Sammy Honicutt and His Rich Lady.” My mother sat, horrified, eyes straight ahead. But Mother never blamed Poppa for putting her through this. Between my folks on the cushioned buckboard’s seat, I tried and imagine how we looked. I saw Momma in her tailored gray suit, her cameo that she left me later, her hair swept back, the solid evidence of a foundation garment keeping her solid and true, wasp-waisted. How beautiful she was! I compared her with the seed-sack dresses at the roadside, the sallow faces and rude open mouths that followed us along our trip. I slid closer to her. I tried reading more of the book where the downstairs maid at a great English house falls “rather hopelessly” in love with the lord’s second son. A long kind lecture from the village preacher sets her aright and she signs on to be a missionary and is rather honorably killed by brown folks in India. Out this far in rural Burgaw County, even reading aloud seemed a form of showing off. I pictured Shirley’s city beauty. This far into the country, they would worship her, my saint of the crinoline.