Lies My Mother Never Told Me (10 page)

I
VISITED
R
OBINSON
, I
LLINOIS, MY
father's hometown, for the first time in early December 1982. I went with Frank MacShane, who was researching his biography of James Jones. I was in my second year at Columbia. My mother didn't want me to go, but for the sake of the biography, she didn't try to stop me. She thought I was a very peculiar girl to want to go and learn about a part of my father's life that she'd spent the last twenty-five years trying to obliterate. If she could have, she would have erased all of James Jones's life before he met her, nuked the southern half of Illinois. But even that might not have been enough to quell the anger she still felt at my father's lie about his relationship with Lowney Handy.

My father's time with the Handys caused his own family split. There was a skirmish, then a war, some long-lasting feud. My father never discussed what had caused the rift between him and his brother, Jeff. It had happened before he married my mother, and perhaps had something to do with his notoriety in Robinson and his peculiar living arrangement with the Handys, and the writers' colony that sprang from their relationship. Or maybe it had to do with my uncle Jeff also wanting to be a writer, and after the success of
From Here to Eternity,
my father tried to help Jeff get a novel published at Scribner's, but the book was turned down. I did not know this in 1982 but learned it from their letters, which I read for the first time many years later.

There was no question that the Handys' unorthodox colony fueled fear and resentment in the community. Lowney had even been accused of running a satanic cult. After my father was world famous and no one could touch him, he told a local newspaper, shortly after his marriage to Gloria, that they planned to start a Haitian-style voodoo church in Marshall, like the one in which they'd been married in Port-au-Prince. I'm amazed that people in Robinson and Marshall actually took his joke seriously.

I wanted to go to Robinson to learn about my roots, but I also wanted to help Frank MacShane write the best biography he could. I thought that by my accompanying him, the Robinson population might talk more honestly with him about my father's childhood and youth.

When Frank and I pulled into Robinson's town square, I found myself reliving the opening pages of my father's second novel,
Some Came Running.
It was like returning to a place I knew well, so vivid was the square in my mind—the utilitarian redbrick courthouse with its flat roof, surrounded by small stores, including the jewelry store, The Lobby bar, and the bank, all three important settings in the book.

After my father's discharge from the army hospital in Memphis in 1943, having blown all his back pay on a fancy suite in the Peabody Hotel and booze and girls, he received his papers to return to active duty, and went AWOL. Soldiers were being shipped off to England to prepare for the Normandy invasion, and he had no desire to kill anyone ever again. He also believed absolutely that his luck had run out, so he took off. Bumming around was not new to him. After he'd graduated from high school in 1939, he'd hit the road, hitchhiked his way to Canada.

As a twenty-one-year-old veteran, in 1943, he bummed around the country, jumped on freight trains, hitchhiked, and got along by doing odd jobs and hanging out with other wounded veterans, discharged or on the lam. One day, after a major drinking binge,
he woke up on a bus headed for Robinson. And this is exactly what takes place in the opening of
Some Came Running
, except in the novel, the war is over, and our protagonist, Dave Hirsh, is returning home from the European Theater.

 

Once, when I was quite little and wouldn't eat my dinner, my father told an appalling story, which has stayed with me all my life. When he was homeless, he'd go into bars and ask for a glass of water, then fill the water with ketchup for something to eat. He'd also stop at people's back doors around dinnertime and ask them for their scraps. I was so horrified I cried for hours and I never forgave him for telling me this, and it was on my mind when Frank MacShane and I arrived in Robinson, population 6,700. We parked in front of the
Robinson Daily News
office to meet the publisher, Kent Lewis. As we stepped out of the car, the skies opened up and it didn't stop raining for three days.

Lewis, a quiet, reserved, elderly gentleman, had a whole itinerary planned out for us. Within five minutes, the phone started ringing. The entire town knew that the daughter of their prodigal son had returned.

I met the old librarian, Vera Newlin, who had so carefully guided my father's early reading. He'd arrive on his tricycle daily and pester her for new books. By the time he was ten years old, he'd read every book in the children's library and wanted access to the adult books. Special permission was granted, and he was allowed to read certain carefully chosen books, with no sex or swearwords.

I was invited into the home of his longtime sweetheart, Annis Flemming, the girl in his short story “The Valentine,” who was still beautiful, with exquisite black eyes and a fine, delicate bone structure, though she was now in her midsixties. Her husband, Hap, welcomed me with a gentle hug and a cup of tea. Annis confided to me in a mere whisper that my grandmother, Ada Jones,
had been fed up with motherhood and had not wanted this second child, twelve years after Jeff was born. Ada had told Jim when he was little that she'd tried to kill him in the womb by throwing herself down the stairs. I realized, with a shiver, that my other grandmother, the Dread Gertrude, had told Gloria the same thing, except Gertrude had stuck a knitting needle up inside her. She told Gloria, “You were stubborn even then.”

Later, when Jim was two or three, Annis said, Ada would tie him to a clothesline in the backyard and leave him there until nightfall. The neighbors, including Annis's mother, were concerned, but back then people minded their own business, and no one felt they had a right to interfere. “He was such a gentle, fragile boy.” Annis took my hand in hers, which were warm and dry. “He was a bit of a show-off, but that was not really who he was inside. He was hurting so bad when he came back after the war,” she said. “All the boys were like that when they came back.”

My father's best and oldest childhood friend, Tinks Howe, and his wife, Helen, invited us to their house for dinner. They told the story of the day my father received the galley proofs of
From Here to Eternity,
and Burroughs Mitchell, the young editor who'd inherited James Jones after the death of the mighty Maxwell Perkins, asked my father to delete more than 350 swearwords from the manuscript. The publishers had already taken out most of the homosexual sex scenes, as well as the phrase
piece of ass
, substituting instead
piece of tail.
My father couldn't get the homosexual scenes back in, but he did put
piece of ass
back, in every case. Helen, Tinks, Lowney, and Jim sat around for days, going through each page, and while he was willing to negotiate on certain words, on others, he categorically refused to yield. During one of my dad's visits to New York, Burroughs Mitchell had told him that he'd been in the army during the war and he didn't remember the men talking like that at all. “Of course not,” my father replied, “you were an officer.”

Helen mentioned that when my father returned the galleys, he wrote a letter to Mitchell that said: “The things we change in this book for propriety's sake will in five years, or ten years, come in someone else's book anyway, that may not be as good as this one, and then we will kick ourselves for not having done it, and we will not have been first with this…and we will wonder why we thought we couldn't do it. Writing has to keep evolving into deeper honesty, like everything else, and you cannot stand on past precedent or theory, and still evolve…. You know there is nothing salacious in this book as well as I do. Therefore, whatever changes you want made along that line will be made for propriety, and propriety is a very inconstant thing.”

My God, how did he know this? He was only twenty-nine years old!

Tinks Howe took me aside toward the end of the evening and murmured, “I never blamed Jim for leaving. I knew why he left and never looked back. I understood. And even though I never talked to him again, I always thought of him as my best friend.”

The next day, as the deluge continued, Helen took me to visit an ancient woman with a pinched, parchment-like face, who'd been a friend of my grandmother's and a member of the Christian Science church Ada Jones had joined in middle age. There was something sanctimonious and frightening in the woman's glassy eyes as she told me with complete conviction that my grandmother had loved her little Jimmy and knew he was a special gift from God because God had come to her in a dream and told her so.

“Was that before or after she threw herself down the stairs to get rid of the pregnancy?” I asked the woman, my voice trembling with anger. Her eyes veered away from mine and off to the side, then up toward the ceiling, then came back at me, shiny and dense as marbles.

“Well that's just cruel gossip,” she said. “There was never a finer, God-loving woman than Ada Jones.”

She brought to mind another story, long forgotten. My father had told me this, and I don't know what triggered it: when he was about ten years old, his mother had caught him playing with himself. Those were his words—“playing with myself.” Ada told him if he didn't stop he would turn black. He tried to stop, but it was irresistible. While he was sleeping, she painted his right palm black with indelible India ink. In the morning he tried to wash off the spot but couldn't and was forced to go to school with the telltale spot on his palm. He spent the whole day in an agony of shame, trying to hide his hand in his pocket.

When he came home, Ada said, chuckling in a self-satisfied way, “See, I told you, black as a nigger.”

He'd told me he intended to write a short story about it, which he would call “The Black Hand of God.” He never did.

 

I asked Doug Lawhead, a young journalist and photographer for the
Robinson Daily News,
if he could find out where my grandparents were buried. The next day, in the blinding rain, he drove me to the cemetery. We stopped at the flower shop just beyond the gates and I bought a bouquet of carnations and roses, the only flowers they had that were not plastic. We got out of the car and walked across the drenched grass until we came to a large, square monument with
JONES
carved in the stone. Before the monument were the graves of my great-grandparents, George W. Jones and his wife, Christine. My father had told me a little about this grandfather. He'd been a quarter Cherokee and had long black hair that he only cut on the dark of the moon, which, he insisted, is why it remained black till the day he died. He had been elected town sheriff twice, and my father had adored him. About his wife, I knew nothing at all. On the other side were my grandfather, James Ramon Jones; my grandmother, Ada Blessing Jones; and Mary Ann Jones, my aunt who'd died in 1952, at the age of twenty-seven, of a seizure brought on by night epilepsy.

The only information my father ever gave me on Mary Ann was that she'd died in her trailer on the Handy Colony grounds in Marshall, and that she'd “swallowed her tongue.” He used to tell me when I was little, especially when Jamie and I fought, that he'd been mean to his sister and he regretted it every day. My father had put two stanzas of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay on her headstone:
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind—Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave
…

The Jones family monument had several empty plots, and I wondered for whom they'd been intended.

Standing there in the rain, I felt an enormous sense of responsibility. How did this boy, this strange, suffering boy, grow up here, flee, go to war, survive Guadalcanal, and return home to write not one, but four of the most important novels about World War II? Many soldiers had survived, and a few had written excellent books—but my father's were considered by common foot soldiers and war experts everywhere to portray the true experience of war. And I was his child, reared so far away from this place I had no connection to it, except for a few kind strangers, and five headstones in the town cemetery. I laid the flowers on Mary Ann's grave.

 

No one in Robinson wanted to talk about Mary Ann or her death. I was told during the next day, in a kind of indirect way, that some members of the Jones family, led by my great-uncle Charlie Jones, an upstanding, churchgoing, well-respected member of the community, had demanded an inquest. Uncle Charlie believed that Lowney had played a malevolent role in Mary Ann's death. People had hinted to me that Mary Ann was addicted to pills. My mother—not my father—had once told me that Mary Ann had married a black man, and the Upstanding Members of the family had stopped her estranged husband from attending the funeral. No one in Robinson would confirm anything about Mary Ann,
except that she was kind, and pretty, and a complete mess. I have two sepia-toned photographs of my aunt. In them she is smiling, an overweight girl with the same pained eyes and square jaw and thin lips as my father.

The only fact I could ascertain conclusively was that the medical examiner had judged her death to be of natural causes, and no inquest was ever held.

I have a mimeographed letter from Uncle Charlie to my dad, dated shortly after Mary Ann's death. Its tone is so overblown, cruel, condescending, smug, and self-righteous that it is no wonder my father hated pretentious bores—he'd been forced to suffer this one for years.

I went to see my new friend Annis Flemming again, and she told me in confidence—and asked me not to tell Frank MacShane—that my father had left town in 1939, in part because Uncle Charlie had “gotten into trouble with a young woman” and put the blame on Jim. I never found out any more, because every time I brought up the subject of “some kind of trouble with Uncle Charlie,” I was met with that flat, blank, uniquely midwestern stare, as uninviting as a bramble-covered stone wall.