I Dwell in Possibility. Toni McNaron

Out of the Nest

      I grew up in a one-story white frame house, with living room, dining room, and kitchen on one side of a long hall, three bedrooms and a bath on the other. The house was in Fairfield, Alabama, home of Tennessee Coal and Iron (TCI), a subsidiary of United States Steel. Called the Pittsburgh of the South, TCI boasted a model steel workers’ town, with low-cost housing and schools located near the plant. Nothing was said about the grit that appeared on window sills and furniture within hours of dusting. Because the worst of the manual labor in the hellish blast furnaces was done by blacks, they outnumbered whites. Everyone in Birmingham, the city to which Fairfield was attached, worked directly for “the company” or for one of its necessary feeder industries and services. It was the late thirties, and the South had only just begun to pull out of the Great Depression.

      My father progressed from working in the wire mill as junior bookkeeper to being chief accountant for TCI, and we lived where we did for his convenience. He liked to come home for lunch, and the mill was only about ten minutes from our house. Though an unpretentious house in a working-class neighborhood, my home was full of antiques. A few of them, including a delicate drop-leaf, three-drawer sewing table, came down the Mississippi on a flat boat with my maternal great-grandmother. With her French Huguenot family, she had fled one of many persecutions and landed in Canada. Some of the other fine pieces were gifts to my mother, primarily from my sister but occasionally from my father. I remember a fishing trip from which he returned with a four-branch gas chandelier and no fish. He had spied it in the barn of a farm where he had stopped to get fresh eggs. Painted red, it was being used by the local chickens, attested to by wisps of straw still falling from the lamp bases. My father bought it for a couple of dollars, and we all watched as it became a gorgeous brass light that hung from then on in our living room.

      Most of the antique furniture was acquired by my mother in her many jaunts to shops filled with old chests and tables, china, silver, and other bric-a-brac. In the forties, Alabama shopkeepers were not always aware of the value of their holdings, but my mother knew wood grains, silver markings, porcelain symbols. Often I accompanied her to serve as decoy. We would arrive at a shop and browse until the proprietor asked if he could help us. Somehow, Mamie (the name my sister had used as a baby that became what most people called my mother) turned the conversation to me, and I launched into one of my distracting recitals. Since I knew names of rivers, oceans, continents, and other phyla, I could charm adults fairly easily. While I spouted off something years ahead of my comprehension, my mother slipped into remoter rooms of unfinished furniture. Using the pearl-handled penknife always in her purse, she quickly chipped through some colored paint on a washstand or end table. When she found cherry or mahoghany, or, on rare occasions, rosewood, she returned to me smiling. At the next lull in whatever conversation the owner and I were having, she would say in all innocence, “Oh, I happened to notice the little painted piece in back—how much is that if I just take it with me now and not bother you with refinishing it?” If the price was right, a bargain was struck, and the piece piled into the back of our old black Plymouth. Once home, and the newest treasure in the basement, she and I stripped off the bad color, restoring the wood to its original beauty.

      Perhaps had my mother lived in another age or been able to tell herself a different story, she might have opened an elegant little shop. Then she could have bought up old painted pieces, restored them, and sold them to people wanting the pleasure of owning them. Instead, we accumulated pieces of antique furniture as my schoolmates’ parents might collect matchboxes or miniature china horses. Inside my house, I often felt overwhelmed by objects I had been told were priceless and feared I might accidently knock to the floor at any moment.

      My mother seldom did anything on a small scale. Though she was only four feet eleven inches tall, her imagination and energy formed a force field that lent her at least an additional foot. This commanding presence left me often feeling eclipsed, effaced, though Mamie clearly adored me. I still remember going into our house on Holly Court some five months after she had died and being met instantly by the smell of her perfume. It was as if she had just stepped out and would return at any moment.

      When I first knew her, she was already forty, so I have very little sense of her as a girl or young woman. Old photos show her in typical twenties styles—tight-fitting black dresses with lace, low-slung wide belts, large ornamental pins on her equally large bodice, funny hats with feathers. One story from her youth that I heard repeatedly was about a dance in Montgomery to which she went, along with Zelda Sayre of whom my mother was an acknowledged look alike. She and Zelda reputedly decided to play a joke on Scott Fitzgerald, in town on furlough from the army. My mother was to “play” Zelda for a time to see if Scott could tell the difference. I listened as Mamie spun her tale about dancing with the dashing soldier who would become one of America’s great writers. The joke seems to have worked, at least in her reminiscence.

      But the person I knew in childhood had changed in some major ways from that storybook character. No longer svelte, my mother was always either on a diet or about to go on one. Given her frame, at 160 or so, she was twenty to thirty pounds overweight. Rising in the morning full of resolution, she ate her two squares of zwieback and drank a cup of tea while pointing out her virtue to us egg and toast munchers. By lunch, resolve had weakened to allow a taste of whatever dessert she had made for the rest of us; by dinner, caution had flown into the southern air. Mamie was a fine and proud cook, preferring French dishes with rich sauces and elaborate sweets of all sorts. Her cream puffs were legendary, shared with many townspeople when she had to make her contracted monies for the church coffers. Birthdays brought out all her creative talents, not only in the cake of one’s choice but in the side dishes: sweet potatoes mashed and put into scooped-out orange halves complete with handles; fried chicken wings or pork chops dressed in paper “shoes” to keep fingers greaseless; tiny Parker House rolls shaped like miniature English pasties.

      Her weight in no way obscured her elegance. Most weekdays, Mamie wore a house dress and a smock during the morning as she cleaned or cooked. In mid-afternoon, she took a leisurely bath and “dressed”—nice clothes over massive foundation garments, careful make-up to give her a certain old world beauty. Her hair was brownish with auburn tints, often worn wrapped around a thick rat that lent a halo effect not unlike Greer Garson. The wreath, which softened her face, also cast her backward in time.

      Throughout my childhood, my mother wore tiny pince-nez glasses. Whenever she took them off, two bright red ellipses appeared on either side of her patrician nose. I called these “holes” and worried because they took so long to fade. When she finally succumbed to tortoise-shell glasses with regulation ear pieces, she lost some of her exoticism.

      Early in the twentieth century, when she was nearing twenty, Mamie had won a scholarship to study piano outside the South. But before she could leave Selma, Alabama, she met, fell in love with, and married Mac, as she called my father. They carried on a brief courtship when he was on shore leave from Newport News, Virginia, and were married over Thanksgiving of 1917, because Daddy could get away at holiday time. Most of the photographs in their early years are of them in bathing suits or other casual wear at some beach with lots of relatives. A little later they appear with my sister, Betty, born about a year after they were wed.

      My father was handsome in a craggy sort of way. About five feet six or seven, he had steel blue eyes that stare out of photographs much as they did in real life. He seems almost always to have worn his hair in a close crew cut. It was totally gray when I was born, the story being that it turned overnight after his father died. When I knew him, he too was overweight, though he never seemed to be doing anything to change that. My mother tried to get him to wear belts, but he insisted they cut him and so he preferred suspenders. They allowed him to buy trousers that were loose, that let him breathe. As a child I often watched in excited horror on those occasions when his trousers inched down over his stomach, lower and lower, until, suddenly recalling them, he hitched them back to his waist. He was the perfect antidote to Mamie, in her half-body girdles and massive brassieres.

      But his laxity in the matter of fitted clothes was delusive. I was constantly surprised by the particular forms of his fastidiousness. One that seemed especially romantic to me as a child involved his donning a smoking jacket some weekday evenings after supper and on weekends