This tough attitude toward the sisters was already set by the fifth grade, and continues to register in her adult letters. Given license by the unconditional love of her father, and by the contentious attitude of her mother toward a few of the sisters — Mrs. O’Connor, for instance, felt her daughter ought to be allowed home for lunch — she might well, as a sarcastic fifth-grader, have said, or overheard, a comment along these lines, as she wrote to her friend Ted Spivey in the late fifties: “A lot of them who are teaching are competent at most to wash dishes.” Writing as a thirty-two-year-old to her spiritual adviser Father McCown, she complained of having been “taught by the sisters to measure your sins with a slide rule.” Elsewhere she evoked the “hot house innocence” of the cloistered nuns in her convent school. Rebellion still rising in her voice, she bragged of herself as “a long standing avoider of May processions and such-like nun-inspired doings.”
Between the third and seventh grade, these tussles with the Mercy nuns spilled over into the safe haven of an upstairs room in her home. In a state of mind somewhere between a child’s daydream and one of the scriptural visions she heard preached about in church, she imagined bouts with a guardian angel she pictured as half nun, half bird. As she mock-confided to Betty Hester, twenty years later: “From 8 to 12 years it was my habit to seclude myself in a locked room every so often and with a fierce (and evil) face, whirl around in a circle with my fists knotted, socking the angel. This was the guardian angel with which the Sisters assured us we were all equipped. . . . You couldn’t hurt an angel but I would have been happy to know I had dirtied his feathers — I conceived him in feathers.”
She was clearly conflicted. Her authority issues with the nuns were obvious, yet she loved feathered creatures. As these boxing matches did not sum up all of her juvenile feelings about the Catholic religion, she began to draw a distinction, within herself, between the sisters and the Church. On May 8, 1932, Mary Flannery O’Connor was led with the other girls by their captain up the left aisle of the cathedral, while the boys proceeded up the right, for a First Communion she felt was “as natural to me and about as startling as brushing my teeth.” Two years later, on May 20, 1934, she was just as naturally confirmed in the Church. If the little girl of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” embodied her anti-nun sentiments, she also displayed more vulnerable girlhood devotion. As O’Connor writes of the budding of the fragile seeds of faith in the twelve-year-old, “The child knelt down between her mother and the nun and they were well into the
‘Tantum Ergo’
before her ugly thoughts stopped and she began to realize that she was in the presence of God. Hep me not to be so mean, she began mechanically. Hep me not to give her so much sass. Hep me not to talk like I do. Her mind began to get quiet and then empty.”
Mrs. O’Connor oversaw with watchful vigilance the childhood of this special daughter, who was filled with such deeply felt stirrings, as well as some weird imaginings. Her third cousin Patricia Persse judged her “a very peculiar child.” In her own entertaining, Regina liked to be sophisticated and
au courant.
One of her favorite party dresses, stylish among American ladies in the 1920s, was a lavender crepe silk kimono, hemmed in lace, with long, flowing sleeves, and an Empire fitted waist clasped with a small bouquet of silk flowers in pale pink, ecru, and coral. Yet for her daughter, the mother invited into their home only those well-behaved playmates eager to participate in games and activities involving fantasy and imagination. The rumor in the neighborhood was that Mrs. O’Connor kept a list of approved playmates, and at least once turned a child away.
One of the happier events promoted weekly by the mother was a Saturday morning gathering around the radio in the parlor to listen to
Let’s Pretend,
a CBS radio series for children that began broadcasting in March 1934. Opening with a jaunty musical theme, the popular show used a cast of child actors, often eight or nine years old, to render, live, such classics as “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the Beast,” or “Rumpelstiltskin.” The announcer would roar at the outset, “Heellooo, Pretenders!” Having listened with his brother and sister to the same program in another part of the country, the Brooklyn-born children’s author Maurice Sendak could still summon for an interviewer some of its dialogue and mood seventy years later: “‘How do we get to Pretend Land?’ And a little boy would say, ‘Let’s go on a boat!’ We’d
stare
at the radio.”
At the end of the thirty-minute broadcast, Mrs. O’Connor served snacks of hot chocolate with homemade gingerbread or brownies to the kids, including Lillian and Ann Dowling, Cousin Margaret Persse, and Newell Turner, the daughter of an osteopath, who lived across the street on “the tall floors” of Hamilton House, built in the 1870s in the decorative style of a Second Empire château. “Mrs. O’Connor was very friendly and sweet and nice,” remembers Newell Turner Parr. “And very particular. She had very definite ideas about things. I remember Mr. O’Connor more vaguely because he was not at home, he was at work. Fathers were usually not quite as available.” Taking her cue from one of the
Let’s Pretend
broadcasts of 1934, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Parr has said of her friend Mary Flannery, “She was really genuine . . . to adults, she would say what she thought, which wasn’t always acceptable. I am sure that if she had been around, she would have been the first to tell the emperor that he didn’t have any clothes on.”
Many of the same playmates were enrolled in a short-lived club Mary Flannery formed about the same time the radio program first aired. She dubbed her group the “Merriweather Girls,” after a series of adventure books, and nominated herself president. Its members, fancying themselves Bet, Shirley, Joy, and Kit of Merriweather Manor, met in a gazebo-like wooden playhouse, a gift of Katie Semmes. The playhouse was fitted into a corner of the backyard, otherwise teeming with Rhode Island red, Plymouth Rock, and white leghorn chickens. During several afternoons, these girls sat about a round table, straddling quaint, triangular seats constructed by an uncle, and listened as President O’Connor read to them her latest stories. “She had pages and pages of handwritten stories,” Merriweather Girl Parr has admitted, “but I wasn’t quite smart enough to listen attentively.” Written in pencil on lined notebook paper, with her own illustrations, the tales concerned a family of ducks traveling the world.
O’Connor sometimes led a friend or two upstairs in the family house to her secret attic, a third floor kept for guests. In a remote bathroom, she liked to sit back in a large bathtub supported on porcelain feet, disconnected from any plumbing, and have her friends read aloud from her latest works. Sister Jude Walsh, a former principal of St. Vincent’s, tells of Marguerite Pinckney, a child with a flair for performance, who went along with Mary Flannery’s wishes as they sat together in the dry tub: “But then Marguerite would get miffed because in the middle of a paragraph Mary Flannery would say, ‘Stop right there. Would you read that over again?’ I guess even then she was attuned to how something was expressed. Marguerite would be annoyed because she saw no reason to stop the flow of the story.”
Within a year of founding the Merriweather Club, Mary Flannery made a minor leap from fantasy into satire. Rather than writing about a family of ducks, she wrote about the members of her own family. Relying on her talent for mocking adults, she created a little collection of vignettes titled “My Relitives,” which her thrilled father helped her have typed and bound. The series of portraits were so finely drawn, and uncomfortably close to life, that the relatives given this treatment by their mischievous daughter, cousin, or niece either hesitated — or simply refused — to recognize themselves. As Regina O’Connor once told an Atlanta journalist, “No one was spared.” Reaction was strong enough that O’Connor brought up the scandal to her friend Maryat Lee twenty-five years later: “I wrote a book at the age of ten, called ‘My Relatives.’ Seven copies were printed and distributed by me. It was in the naturalistic vein and was not well received.”
A
T THE START
of the sixth grade, Mrs. O’Connor abruptly pulled her daughter from St. Vincent’s and enrolled her in Sacred Heart School. The switch was a minor scandal on Lafayette Square. A former Marist boy has recalled, even though he and his friends knew neither mother nor daughter, “We heard stories about Mary Flannery O’Connor leaving St. Vincent’s and transferring out to Sacred Heart.” Though her new school was located in a modern brick building on the corner of Abercorn and 38th streets, run by the more formally educated Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, who taught Regina in high school in Augusta, the move to a school in a different parish was highly unorthodox.
Mrs. O’Connor may well have been responding to her daughter’s annoyance with the nuns at St. Vincent’s. In her fifth and final year at the school, O’Connor’s absences had mounted to twenty-four. There was talk as well that the mother was more partial to the “lace-curtain” population in the more genteel Thomas Square neighborhood of clapboard houses — some rather grand, built between the late nineteenth century and the beginning of World War I — than to the “shanty” mix in the downtown school. “We were a rough and ready bunch at St. Vincent’s in the old days,” Sister Consolata has readily admitted. The Dowling sisters also transferred that year to Sacred Heart, possibly swaying Mrs. O’Connor’s decision. But one of them, Lillian, has remarked, a bit coyly, that their friend’s move really stemmed from “the strictness of a certain nun.”
Katie Semmes’s shiny, black electric car was pressed into service to make the mile-long trip from Lafayette Square to 38th Street, a direct drive south on Abercorn. One of only two left in Savannah, such electric models had been popular in the teens and early twenties, especially among women, because they ran on rechargeable lead acid batteries, no hand-cranking required. Each weekday morning, Mary Flannery took her place in its open carriage, with a bench in the back, two seats in front, and a vase of artificial flowers fixed to the side. Mrs. O’Connor stood commandingly in the rear, steering with a tiller, in her veil and duster and long gloves. “It reminded me of a Toonerville Trolley that you see in cartoons,” says Sister Jude Walsh, then a sixth-grader, of the eccentric vehicle. “I remember a group of us standing on a corner every day to watch Mary Flannery arrive, and then we’d be out there at two fifteen to see her depart to Charlton Street.”
Unlike St. Vincent’s, Sacred Heart was coeducational, evenly divided between about two hundred boys and two hundred girls, taught by nine Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. “They were strict,” says Margaret Persse, who attended Sacred Heart with her cousin. “They were always rapping the boys over the knuckles with a ruler.” Like the rest of the girls, Mary Flannery dressed in the unofficial uniform of white blouse, skirt, and bobby socks, though instead of oxford loafers she wore heavier, brown, laced shoes. Yet something about her overall demeanor struck Sister Jude Walsh as “prissy. You definitely got the impression that she was an introvert and lived a relatively sheltered existence.” Like all of the other girls, O’Connor spent hours learning, by rote, the Latin words to intricate masses, such as the “Mass of the Angels.” Her academic record among this order of nuns, whom she came to think of as “genteel Victorian ladies,” remained unexceptional. At Sacred Heart, she never received higher than a B in Composition.
Seven years into the Great Depression, the daily lives of the students at parochial schools such as Sacred Heart were even more touched by national politics and economics. In the fall of 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won his landslide victory over Alf Landon for a second term. Roosevelt’s presence had always loomed large in Savannah, and many of its citizens kept time by the plot points of his presidency. Of the Bank Holiday of March 1933, Regina O’Connor remembered, decades later, “Mary Flannery was at dancing when President Roosevelt closed the banks.” That November, he toured Savannah for its bicentennial and was entertained by Mayor Thomas Gamble. As the president kept a home in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he was treated for polio in the heated waters, his itinerary was closely followed. Though resisted at first out of civic pride, his New Deal was soon grudgingly, and then eagerly, welcomed for the vital jobs created by programs such as the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
In his second inaugural address, on January 20, 1937, President Roosevelt optimistically promised, “Our progress out of the depression is obvious.” Among those receptive to its message, tuned in to by a nationwide radio audience, was forty-one-year-old Ed O’Connor, whose business losses during Roosevelt’s first term had amounted to a free fall. After his Dixie Realty folded, O’Connor was listed in the
Savannah City Directory,
beginning in 1934, as operating a series of short-lived companies. In 1934, he was manager of the C. F. Fulton Real Estate Company and, in 1936, its president. In 1937, the Fulton Company disappeared, succeeded by O’Connor and Company, advertised as dealing in “real estate, loans, and general insurance.” Among the failed real estate interests O’Connor was said to have “jumped around” were the Tondee Apartments at 37th and Bull streets, and the “Venetian Terrace” on Tybee Island. He wound up in the 1937
Savannah City Directory
once again listed as a salesman for his father’s wholesale grocery company, his financial failures having sent him back to square one.
As fewer business prospects presented themselves, Ed O’Connor sought personal satisfaction by becoming more active in the American Legion, where his good-natured personality helped him flourish. The failing real estate agent possessed an entire checklist of traits for a successful salesman, and in another economic climate might have done well. As a parishioner who saw him at church in Milledgeville with his wife and young daughter recalled, “He was so tall and so handsome. He always smiled.” Regina O’Connor never approved of her husband’s redirecting his energies to the Legionnaires, or of his new Legion friends. Yet he was not swayed. His quick ascent in the Legion began in 1935, with his election to the position of commander of Chatham Post No. 16 in Savannah. In June 1936, according to the
Savannah Morning News,
he was “swept into office by unanimous vote” to the post of state commander for all of Georgia.