That Mother Of Mine
In our near stygian parsonage I lived in gloom until leaving for university. That was because mother held an inviolable disesteem for the outside world. She was instinctively a sort of mystic hermit.
Mother, Frances Eleanor Little, manifestly kept our lives shrouded in a kind of fog clinging to our old, brown wooden furniture, rooms choked with furniture from the 20s and 30s, mainly a lot of heavy scuffed chairs and veneered tables, many somber, tall bookcases packed tight with titles, plus sofas and armchairs of cautious good taste. Almost everything had been given to us by my grandmother, the enigmatic Verna Cain Little, these originating in parsonages across Kansas. For you see mother too had been raised in a parsonage. Apparently this had made an immense impression on her, turned her to rebelling and a sweet iconoclasm.
And then of course on the walls were the gravures of odd themes—dancing pastel nymphs, garlanded marriage scenes, Rome in ruins, and an especially regarded copy of a work by some renaissance Dutch second tier artist. It was quite large in its ornate frame, depicting two goodies their heads bent in gossip over their morning coffee. This work was my favorite and I would stare long at it while I rocked until I’d step into it and disappear from myself.
Books, books, books were the only bric-a-brac. No crosses, no sentimental prints of Jesus as an Anglo Saxon so pretty and groomed that there could be no doubt but that he was gay. No religious imagery at all. Strange parsonage.
The general jumble gave an impression of faded gentility. Mother arranged the rooms in a faux grandeur, on the edge of pretentious, but saved from that because our household god was shabby good taste in deep brown wood under a dim film of dust. Mother never dusted.
Those darkened rooms, all that dark furniture, I am most at home in faustian stage sets.
My grandfather, Rev. William Fletcher Little, was not a successful pastor and so my grandparents had moved ever one or two years hauling their/our furniture back and forth across Kansas with their two daughters one of whom was refined to pretention and prone to airs, the other being my willful unadorned mother.
My grandmother need no airs, none. she was naturally the real thing. Grand by nature, elegance and refinement in her genes. Perhaps without meaning to she was grandfather’s problem. A town’s only duchess living in the Methodist parsonage. She couldn’t help being naturally imposing.
So they were dispatched frequently going like refugees from one dusty speck of a sorry depression-blighted town to another.
This hand-me-down interior world of ours mother kept obsessively sequestered by drawn window shades, lowered and closed blinds, clothes pins to tightly pinch together the thick drapes.
As I grew older this seemed to me to be more for my mother’s protection than ours. She’d been scarred by small town inquisitions and gossip. In those times a pastor’s family was too prominent to be ignored, a poor and powerless elite.
Safe in this world, hers, she would flop down on a living room carpet to read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner to her heart’s content. Bare legs bent up awards at the knees, bare feet wiggling.
This closeted world she made for our family she fiercely protected from encroachment. Virtually no one was allowed into it. She spoke to visitors on the porch or if of no importance to my father’s church business on the crabgrass lawn that each summer was left to grow high and dead in a barrier of weeds.
Recall that mother was wife to one of the, if not the, most prominent pastor in the towns where I grew up. Everyone knew who we were. Everyone took regard of us.
How unorthodox a home my mother kept is attributed to by the act that after seven years in Concordia, on moving out day our neighbors on either side threw a goodbye party–we were NOT invited—they stood oon their Republican lawns to toasted their martini glasses to us in great relief as we drove away.
I think that the chronic unruliness of our desiccated yard, a startling standout amid the middle class grooming of its neighbors, just like the closed tight house itself, these were a warning to stay away.
Safe inside her forbidding walls mother wore no girdle or bra, no hose or shoes. I soon learned that she wore no underwear either except during a period. Her hair was often uncombed. On a daily basis she didn’t waste time to applying any makeup.
For Sunday all this changed for the duties of church. Then she put on a proud show of her best gentility. She’d wear one of her tasteful and tailored outfits, bought in last gasp sales in the best stores in Kansas City when we made our very occasional trips there.
On Sundays her hair was perfect. Then her makeup was pastor’s-wife discrete. She also dabbed the most infinitesimal drop of French perfume to the base of her throat so that in passing she gave the ephemeral vision of a Parisian antique store on the Rue de Rivoli. She wore no jewelry except for her wedding ring (which she herself would pawn to pay bills in a sleazy KC pawn shop, on the sly of father who would believe her story that it needed repair) a slim gold watch and earrings—small elegant things that my father had brought back to her from Italy, acquired in his time as an Army Captain in Europe.
Otherwise she never cleaned house. She washed the dishes only on the occasions when she was between books and couldn’t decide on what to begin next.
Finally my father would explode in rage and fury at her, shouting “Missy Mac, clean up this nigger hovel!” This his most profound, Alabama invective to fling at her. Including her most detested word.
Then she’d merely admonish him with an even “Mancil, please don’t speak that way, it makes you sound like Governor Wallace and I know you don’t want to be him.” This came from her lips pursed in disapproval.
To placate him she’d smile sweetly and neatly spread a dish towel over the offending mess in the sink. She might even swipe irresolutely at the kitchen table with a damp cloth.
Mother never made our beds, never changed the sheets. She’d leave fresh ones for us on the stairs. She ironed my father’s shirts, but nothing for us. Instead she taught us to iron, to do so if we wanted ironed clothes. None of this was done by her in the slightest rancor. She dwelled with her four men in her happy, loving, impish little girl way.
As for us we were schooled in what she called ‘The Bishop Dana Dawson cleaning.”
What were we to do at the sound of an expensive car in the driveway and peeked to see that the Bishop had come unannounced? All portable detritus was to be hauled into a back room, door closed. She would kick her piles of books under the sofa. Same with empty Dr. Pepper cans and plates of sandwich crusts. She’d scamper for stockings and bra, run a brush through her hair.
We could be ready for the Bishop in five minutes flat. The Bishop was fond of me so my job was to run out to their car and stall them with boyish gibberish.
Music and books define us in my mind, we were an oasis on the High Plains without great music or masterpieces of literature. Our very home walls were held up by books, or so it seemed. Hundreds of books.
She did not permit our closest friends inside. And any friend who ever dared touch the keys on our piano without permission, which most did, or squeeze the fruit in order to remark “Gosh, it’s real” where banished for life.
If a would-be friend managed to cross her line and get into the house, and then broke her code of acceptable good manners, after they left she would say blandly, “well that was vulgar.” This became her kiss of death statement about someone, somebody that lonely me had hoped would become a friend.
Mother set the tone for our parsonage existence. Ever polite, governed by kindness and consideration, and her strict politeness and manners above all. She emanated a Stoic acceptance of what she had and did not have.
Mother ruled by love, a thick tapioca pudding of it, which is why my later rebellion against it would reenact the fall of the angel Satan.
She was angry so rarely that when so it was like a silent movie of the Seventh Seal were being shown in ‘our living room. It darkened us in doom.
Her otherwise dreamy brown eyes frosted snapped into deep dark pools. He bud lips clenched, no more roses. She would never say a word. She would never cry not even when my father was giving her his most stinging and nasty verbal abuse.
I never heard her utter a disparaging word. Good Kansas pioneer stock.
But for the most part his her placid and impervious, pretty face beamed a deep and abiding love straight into the core of us.
She was a good looking woman who loved good food, cooked with a bit of class, had pride in it. When my father was doing his graduate studies they had lived for three years in an immigrant section of Boston. This gave her a range of odd dishes to cook.
She also came to Thais by Massenet and wept into a handy hanky every time she heard our recording of Beethoven’s Seventh playing through its third movement.
Of course she never swore, never uttered an unkind, sarcastic or even ironic word. Most of all she gloried in us, she thought us so distinguished, telling us that often. Her pleasure was just to have long talks with us at the kitchen table. She was always interesting, always entertaining. I suppose that mattered more than doing the dishes.
In turn we worshipped her. She became our Holy little Mother. That is until I in a peak of idiocy came to highly resent her, feeling that she was emasculating me.
One mystery to me was her religion. I have come to think 45 years after her death that she may have been a pagan in a patina of Christianity.
Part of her mystique was her adoration of storms. I use to think of her, as our sky turned blue-black and the tree limbs thrashed and blew apart like hay, as waiting for Odin to descend. She’d go outside, to the front yard and stand with upturned face in anticipation of the coming of the storm which sometimes was as grand as a tornado.
Kansas storms filled her with a violent magic that none of us comprehended (least of all my father who’d be taking shelter in the basement with a flashlight).
Yes there was a pagan element to her. While ho-hum Methodist for the rest of the year she always took one week in August to disappear in a telling escapade. Later I learned this was to the Unity Church Village in Kansas City, Missouri. She’d return without comment or explanation.
That is where the world headquarters of a small sect are located on a sprawling 1200 acre site rich with buildings from the 1920s. What unity lacked in size it made up for in money, lots of money. Unity membership is largely made up of movie actresses. Why I cannot say. For mother this annual retreat was so intensely private that I never thought to ask about it.
I am now better informed. Briefly, Unity teaches that all people can improve the quality of their lives through thought.Unity describes itself as having no particular creed, no set dogma, and no required ritual. It maintains that there is good in every approach to God and in every religion that is fulfilling someone’s needs.
How like mother!
Finally, Mother, was also an exhibitionist. More than once my “pals” (I had none hence the ironic quotation marks) would be biking about the neighborhood in the summer heat of Concordia. They’d find me and yell out, “hey Bell, go see what’s in your front yard.”
I would, with sinking heart, and yes there was mother sitting amid our weeds on a lawn chair her dress hiked up to catch a cooling breeze. She’d be sitting front and center to shoot the beaver at any passerby. Truly, mother’s muff was a large fur ball. Although angry and deeply resentful I never had the heart to tell her to lower her dress.
In time, after university and her death, even on into my 50s, my resentment of her turned to hate for her. For a long period I actually forgot the sound of her voice, what she looked like She disappeared from my life.
But of course she was too outstanding and dear to remain vanquished. Eventually she came back to me as a ghostly presence and our old camaraderie returned. I am so sorry to have squandered so much of my living time without her.
She unwittingly molded me into the unorthodox, heretical crazy creature. And I am also a writer as I know she wanted me to be with all her heart.
How came this woman out of context come to be? I learned only a little about it. Much had to do with Grandmother Verna. Some also to her mix of orthodox and unorthodox thought. Part to a mixture of unusual intelligence with a naturally calm and benevolent disposition.
Grandfather William Fletcher was indubitably in the mix as well. In fact watching closely as I did I came to wonder sometimes if he and mother weren’t the same person. Their similarity was astonishing. Kind, quiet, extremely self contained souls. For good reason, I use the word stoic for them in my mind.
The significant difference was in their intelligence. Grandfather was a very sweet passive man, but he didn’t shine with wit like mother did. He’d been born in a soddy on the barren prairie, the son of a teacher and farmer, in turn the son of a teacher and farmer, generations of the same back to the time they followed Cromwell from Scotland to Ulster. Their temperament gave them fortitude as pioneers. This strong benign personality and character startlingly continues in the family despite the terrors of the Bells. When mother was diagnosed with end-stage cancer she came home from the doctor and asked us what we’d like for dinner.
Verna was different. Febrile, critical, brilliant and I think neurotic. She was beautiful with remarkably fine facial bones, a long neck, piercing eyes. She carried herself aristocratically. She had very small wrists and ankles. She was slim. And so effortlessly elegant in person but also in her deportment, how she did her hair, the clothes she chose. How opposite from mother as a child.
She was among the 5% of American women earning a Bachelor’s degree in 1890. She never used it. Instead, prone to migraine’s, it’s said, she spent much of her afternoons in shaded rooms writing poetry and reading.
Her mornings were frenetic, however. First thing she’d open all doors and windows. Then she’d strip down every bod to wash the sheets. After that she’d gather up the carpets to take them out to be beaten by a broom. She’d take a bucket of sand and a long handled stiff brush to scour all her wooden floors.
Her house was not merely impeccable, it was antiseptic. While not be asked to help in the work, her daughters war expected to keep it perfect.
She had nice furniture, nice clothes. Except for housework she wore black from hat down to shoes. Her blonde hair turned slowly to a snow white. She kept it piled into a tight bun. At night I, her favorite grandchild, was elected to watch when she seated at a vanity she’d let her hair down in what I remember as a magnificent cascade fell to the floor. She taught me how to carefully brush it. And later to use the curling iron.
Grandmother always brought me wonderful books with magical illustrations. Unlike my dissident mother I adored her. From evidence Mother probably hated her. It’s unclear. The favoritism for sister Ruth was excruciatingly patent. I think mother bore a lifetime of hurt that her naturally good nature found no release for, most of the time.
When grandmother died I was riding in one of the funeral cortege cars, sitting beside mother. I remember saying “don’t cry” to her. She answered “I am not crying, dear. I never loved her.”
Very late in her life and long after Mother’s death Aunt Ruth told me this. “Your mother and your grandmother were sitting together one time. I was playing the piano. All of a sudden your mother stabbed your grandmother with a hat pin.”
That’s eloquent enough especially for such a gentle person as mother.
Whatever devilment was at play, for myself I can say with a cleared head that Mother more than anyone made me who I am. I never wear underwear.