Authors: Alan Lightman
“I could use Dorothy at my house,” says Lennie. “I could use two Dorothys.”
Lila gives a slight smile and nod of her head. “The dinner parties that Daddy and Mother gave! You remember, Lennie. Hattie Mae was a marvel, wasn’t she? She’d get her sister Pauline to help. For three days before the party, they’d be ironing the table linens and polishing the silverware, polishing every piece of metal that could shine. They polished the brass on the chandeliers and the brass doorknobs and the brass candlesticks and even the brass light switch plates. Then, they’d be in the kitchen for two days baking pie shells and buttermilk biscuits. The day of the party, Hattie Mae and Pauline would get to the house about eight a.m. and cook for ten hours straight. Absolutely scrumptious smells went from one end of the place to the other. At three o’clock, the flowers would arrive. Roses and stargazer lilies. Mother put flowers in every room of the house. At five o’clock, Hoke, Mrs. Twaddle’s chauffeur, would show up wearing a suit and set up the bar right here in the sun room. He put a white tablecloth over one of Daddy’s card tables and brought colored toothpicks for the martini olives. Hattie Mae and Pauline were a marvel. An absolute marvel. For hors d’oeuvres, they served crab dip with flaky biscuits and little pieces of steak on crackers with a tip of an asparagus and a dollop of hollandaise sauce. Then there would be French onion soup, beautiful roast beef, potatoes au gratin, cream spinach with oysters. They got that recipe from somewhere in New Orleans. For dessert they served pecan pie and cherries jubilee. Some of the men got so stuffed they had to go upstairs and lie down in the bedrooms. You’d see shoes in the hallway. The women would say to Mother, ‘What a lovely party, Celia, you’ve outdone yourself.’ Then they’d sneak
into the kitchen and corner Hattie Mae and try to sweet-talk her into giving out her recipes. But Hattie Mae wouldn’t oblige. Hattie Mae was independent minded, but she had a loyalty to Mother.”
“You’re killing me,” says Abi from the living room.
“Too much swishin’ of the dishes for my blood,” says Lennie.
A piece of some toy skitters across the slick marble floor and a toddler chases after it, while my cousin Stephen, who now runs the family business, comments on the lineup of films for the summer. “Nothing great,” says another cousin. “People don’t care if it’s great, they just want escape,” says Jake, a red-faced cousin who keeps a fifty-foot yacht in Florida. “Scott finished number one tennis player in his age group,” says Nancy, another cousin. “Don’t be modest,” says Jake. Nancy makes a face while Jake puts his arm around her.
I look at Nancy and Jake, see them as children when we played together in the leaf pile.
What is this cord? And me, rarely home for the last forty years, now gathered with my family in this old house, a flickering dream I keep repeating.
Bereft Aunt Rosalie walks in with red, swollen eyes. For a moment, she stands in the doorway, tall and ethereal and faint, like a woman in one of Thomas Dewing’s paintings. Then she sits down next to Lennie, who gives her a kiss. The room becomes silent. Despite her grief, Rosalie has managed to order thank-you cards, to be engraved on beige paper just like the ones her mother, Helen, made in Birmingham twenty-five years ago, just like the ones Helen’s mother, Bess, made in Atlanta twenty-five years before that. Uncle Ed’s widow rocks back and forth in her chair, back and forth, and finally says, “He was only a boy when I met him.”
The principal vacation destination for our family during the late 1950s and early 1960s was Kentucky Lake, about two hundred miles northeast of Memphis, an area famous for the eerie morning mists hanging low over the lake. Ambers and lavenders and mossy green hues would refract in the air for an hour, then melt away like some rare species of plant in bloom only a day. For these weekends, we booked rooms at the Kenlake Hotel. It was a three-story rustic building, perched high over rolling grassy hills on one side and the lake on the other. A water tower afforded a magnificent view of the surrounding countryside. If we went out to the hotel balcony early in the morning, before breakfast, we could watch an old man with white hair and suspenders walking slowly around the grounds and turning on the sprinklers. Then, after a breakfast of fresh orange juice and French toast, we wandered down a little path to the water. The lake, with its dissolving mists and the soft landings of blue herons and egrets, spread out before us like a fairyland, far from the world of our schoolwork and carpools. This was the place of our dreams, and the place where my father and mother came closest to happiness.
On the Friday before a weekend at Kentucky Lake, my father would come home early from the office to pack. Packing, and in fact any task that required organization or leadership, brought out the worst in my parents’ relationship. Dad seemed almost
willfully to stumble over himself. When he made the reservations for family trips, dates would be wrong, hotel bookings snarled up, once an entire city misplaced. In the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, we built an underground bomb shelter in the backyard, frightened by President Kennedy’s exhortations for all Americans to protect themselves. My father bumbled the job. He hired an incompetent construction company, and the whole thing filled up with water. For the next several years, we fished out cans of sardines, floating first-aid kits, and other items we had stockpiled for the impending nuclear war.
Packing for a trip to Kentucky Lake, my father would stand incapacitated and confused in front of the closet where he stored life jackets and oars and other boating accessories in a tangled mess. “What are you
doing
, Dick?” my mother would say. “I should trade you in on a better model.” I would watch silently, never speaking up on my father’s behalf. Without responding, Dad would drag one item after another from the closet, looking for something he seldom found, while my mother began hyperventilating. “I’m going to faint, Dick. Where’s Blanche? I’m going to faint.”
At the last minute before departure, my father would discover that he had no clean underwear and summon Blanche to do a quick wash and dry. Then my mother would start to sing.
The drive to Kentucky Lake took three and a half hours, not an easy journey for my three brothers and me as we shoved and fought in the backseat. “Dick, do something,” Mother would demand from the passenger seat. “You’re supposed to be the man of the family.” At that, my father would take one arm off the steering wheel and swat at us in the backseat. The car would swerve on the road, Mother would scream, and my brothers and I would become silent. We felt guilty. But there was something else worse than guilt, something I can express only now. I vowed to myself that I would never be like my father. Never. Surely, he
must have felt that vast, hollow space, that abandonment. But I could not say for sure. Then, and for the next fifty years, I rarely knew what my father felt.
I have good memories of our vacations. We drove up Interstate 51, through Covington, Ripley, Union City, and into Kentucky at South Fulton, passing farmhouses, fields of corn and tobacco, roadside cafés and barbershops, people sitting on benches doing nothing in particular. On the way, we usually stopped in some small town at a Krystal to eat square hamburgers, fries, and milkshakes. Dad would ask for sweet milk, and Mother always wanted raw onions on her hamburgers. The Krystal waitresses wore white uniforms, red-checkered aprons, and white hats. Sometimes, they flirted with one of my brothers or me, and we would puff up like bullfrogs.
Stretching a hundred feet over the lake was a wooden dock owned by the hotel. As soon as we arrived, we would walk out on that dock. My mother always exclaimed over a certain magenta bougainvillea climbing out of a terra-cotta urn, and she would fuss with its winding branches as if seeing an old friend again. On the dock, we breathed in the lake air, and we looked out at the tiny figures of fishermen arcing their fly rods back and forth, back and forth, with the movement of ballet dancers. Later, the hotel brought us bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, and cold Coca-Colas.
My father was a passionate sailor. Each day at Kentucky Lake, he rented a sailboat and cajoled as many of us as possible to come along as his crew. At sea, with his hand on the tiller, Dad displayed the power and command that he lacked on dry land, although he routinely led us into maritime disasters. On one outing, we went under a bridge that was too low and split our mast. On another, my father accidentally jibed while I was sitting (at his orders) on the boom as a human boom vang, and I was catapulted into the air and then into the lake. Lines became
mysteriously tangled around cleats on the dock just as we were sailing away, our boat straining to break free like a wild hog with a lasso around its foot. We ran aground. We crashed into other boats. “Please, Dick,” Mother would say. “Do we have to go sailing?”
“Oh, come on, honey,” my father pleaded.
Lennie sometimes joined us at Kentucky Lake, a “welcome escape,” as she put it, from one of her husbands. Lennie’s preferred activity at Kentucky Lake was to sit in the hotel bar at all hours in full makeup and survey the clientele who walked by, especially the male clientele, her pockets slowly becoming stuffed with names and room numbers written on napkins. As the Kenlake Hotel was moderately priced, Lennie plowed through broad strata of social territory, from lawyers to insurance salesmen, all of them
intéressant
.
Lennie didn’t like to sail any more than my mother did, and she was far too much of a southern flower for outdoor exertions, but she loved the romance of the sea, and she ventured onto the boat so that she could later tell tales to her friends. However, she would develop a headache or some other ailment while we were miles offshore and insist that we turn around immediately and take her back to the landing. She spoiled many outings. Nevertheless, on the drive back to Memphis, Lennie always happily babbled about the marvelous trip she’d had.
As the years went by, my father became more and more vexed with Lennie’s behavior. Quietly, he took countermeasures. When she asked to return to the dock, he sailed in the wrong direction. On the next outing, Lennie brought a navigational chart and kept pointing her finger like a weathervane in the direction of the landing. My father remarked that we would have to sail “into the wind” to get back and took endless tacks, zigzagging for hours. Whereupon Lennie purchased a sailing
book and learned the relation between wind direction and points of sail. My father then asked Lennie to pitch in and haul the jib sheets, which blistered her hands. She bought gloves. My father deliberately ran aground, stranding us all in the boat for a half day. Gradually, Lennie’s outings with us tapered off. But for a long time, she exhibited heroic photographs of herself on the boat wearing foul-weather gear and hiking straps.
On the days that we didn’t eat lunch on the boat, we drove to a little family-run restaurant near Gilbertsville that made fried chicken. Looking out of the restaurant, which was really only three tables on a screened porch, you could see a dirt road and a tractor, meadows rolling off to the horizon, and a quiet pond. The family also kept bees, housed in two wooden boxes sitting on cement blocks in the backyard. While we ate on the screened porch, we could hear the buzzing of the bees, like a soft chorus of background music. Instead of salt and pepper, every table had two jars of fresh honey. We dipped our fried chicken in the honey, which had the flavor of oranges. There were plenty of serving hands. I recall that the family had seven children, including, to my surprise, an adopted African-American boy who was always licking a stick covered in the wonderful orange-blossom honey.
At night, after dinner, the six of us watched television in my parents’ room or played gin rummy, a game my mother loved. Some evenings, we walked along a path by the lake. It was cool, and the opposite shore glinted with the lights of cabins in the woods. By nightfall, all the tensions of the day had evaporated with the mist on the water. Nothing needed to be organized or packed, there was no danger of unintended jibes or low bridges. We were just a family together.
I recently saw a photograph of the large resort that has replaced what I remember of the Kenlake Hotel. I’ve not been
back since 1962, when I was thirteen. Sometimes, I imagine those early mornings on the hotel balcony, my brothers dropping little parachutes of Kleenex and string over the rail, my parents sleepy with their coffee, the old man with suspenders turning on the sprinklers.
During my childhood, as my brothers and I remember it, my father disappeared to his reading chair when he came home from the office, joined the family briefly for dinner, and then disappeared again. The succession of one son after another, while my mother kept trying in vain for a daughter, left my father overwhelmed, and finally detached. We were four boys, born in the space of five years, and our house was chaos. But Dad was detached. Sitting in his chair in the living room, he could read through any amount of yelling and screaming around him, stirring only to turn a page. During the course of an evening, he might say a dozen words. He never knew what clothes hung in our closets or what sports we played after school or what girls we had taken a fancy to. He lived in his own world.
There were exceptions to these vacancies. My father was an amateur flute player, and, for a few years in the early 1960s, a group of musicians came to our house every Tuesday night to play Bach and Handel with him. During intermissions, we could hear Dad in the next room talking to the other players. If we asked, my father would always help us with our school homework, especially when it involved the delicacies of literature. I remember one evening—I was thirteen or fourteen years old—when I came home with “The Raven” to dissect. Dad put down his newspaper and began reciting the verses from memory, then praised the rhythm and alliteration of the poem. After this we
had a lively discussion about the meaning of the last lines: “And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted—nevermore!”