Excerpt
Chapter One Skeeter Davis, Noël Coward, and Eudora Welty “Fuck,” said Frank Hains. “I knew I shouldnt have given that last bourbon to Eudora.” It had taken me almost a decade after that day of my mothers funeral, but I had finally found the only equivalent that Mississippi offered to a Whats My Line? life. Franka John Daly–like presence in Jacksonwas the arts editor of the states afternoon newspaper, for which he also wrote a column called “On Stage.” Eudora was writer Eudora Welty. We were at a cast party for New Stage Theatres latest production, Long Days Journey into Night, starring Geraldine Fitzgerald as Mary Tyrone. Frank and Miss Welty were active members of New Stage, and he was playing host that night at Bleak House, the name given facetiously to his antebellum home by the local literati of Jackson. The Dickensian nickname derived from the houses outward appearance of haunted dilapidation where it sat, rather spookily, on a hill opposite Jacksons lone Jewish cemetery. Inside, however, past the vast front porch, Frankalso a gifted set designerhad redone his home with a lovely simplicity. Books abounded. A collection of vintage LPs filled one whole room, alphabetized and all of them encased in brown paper sleeves. Even though he had this wide selection of music, he usually only played Mabel Mercer, his favorite, or Erik Satie or Blossom Dearie. He also liked Fred Astairefor his voice, not his dancingwhich was so like Frank; he was always looking for the different angle, the way to appreciate an artist or a piece of art in his own way so that appreciation itself became a kind of art form. There was even a Leontyne Price album of pop songs arranged by André Previn he loved to listen to for some rueful smiles; especially the Mississippi divas rendition of “Melancholy Baby” with Previn on the piano and Ray Brown on bass. On the night of that latest cast party he was playing, as a tribute, a lot of Noël Coward, who had died the month before. Frank Hains went to New York City several times a year to review theater and opera for his newspaper and had begun to allow me to stay at Bleak House in his absence. He also subscribed to After Dark magazine, and I would peruse the pages of the slender and sleekly photographed issues when I visited him for their overt appeal to the kind of eroticism I had begun to seek out anyplace I could find it. Frank would stand over my shoulder when a new After Dark arrived in the mail and point out his latest favorite photograph by Roy Blakey or Kenn Duncan and regale me with stories about Angela Lansbury, who was often featured in the pages, or Rudolf Nureyev, whom he insisted I resembled in some sort of Slavic/Southern sleight-of-hand. “I should be more supportive of the ballet,” he said once, staring at the latest photo of Nureyev that After Dark was running. “Im much more at home in literature and drama and musical comedy and opera. Satie is just about the only thing I can stomach that doesnt have a lyric. That, and Bach, but theres a mathematical genius to old J. B. I find fascinating. I once had a crush on a mathematician when I was, like you, a college sophomore. I knowcan you picture me a sophomore? Hmmm . . . why Bach and Satie? Theres a column in there somewhere,” he said, using one of his favorite phrases as he pushed his black-framed reading glasses atop his thin-haired head, a habit of his when a concept for a column occurred to him, as if he were helping his brain to see the idea floating about his skull back there around his bald spot. Franks kitchen in Bleak House was as big as most homes. Theatrical postersalong with several of the photographs that Miss Welty had taken of innately elegant dirt-poor Mississippians when she worked as a publicist for the Works Project Administration during the Depressionhung along the walls of the houses “dogtrot,” the open hallway that runs through the center of so many Southern homes of the antebellum period. A couple of years earlier, Miss Welty had collected many of the photos of her Depression-era travels in a volume titled One Time, One Place. She always preferred to refer to them as “snapshots,” however, and recalled fondly the little Rolleiflex camera she toted around with her upon her return from her year in business school up at Columbia University, her eyes readjusting, expertly so, to the reasons that had drawn her back home. I had first met Frank and Miss Welty when I was still in high school. A mutual friend from Forest had taken me to a book party Frank had thrown for Miss Welty at Bleak House. Although I was only sixteen at the time, I had immediately been accepted into their fold. No eye masks were needed, I discovered, but there were other requirements. A liberal political bent helped. A sense of ones own sensuality. Discernment certainly. And, most important, enough knowledge to know when to join a heady conversation or, better yet, simply to listen while others carried on one around you. I learned more sitting at Franks big round kitchen table than I ever did in any classroom as he and Miss Weltywho would wander over the few blocks it took to drive her blue Ford Fairlane from Pinehurst Streetwent off on Richard Nixon or Vladimir Nabokov, but practically swooned over the poetic justness to be found in Jane Austen and somebody “just about the best” named Henry Green. They liked jazz, tooMiss Welty had done a lot of club-hopping in Harlemand taught me that bourbon was never to be augmented by anything other than maybe an added ice cube if one simply must when yet another Mississippi August demanded such a dilution, and sipping at a slightly watered-down potation was the only reasonable exertion that such heat and humidity humanly allowed. Their refilled glassesit was my honor to administer the respective cubesfueled their conversation until they drifted sometimes, not often, from cerebral musings to those of the heart. They were mostly circumspect when discussing their lost loves. Frank would often allude to his “dusky endeavors,” as they had come to refer politely to his interest in young African Americans, some of whom had touched him deeply with their aspirations and narratives of maternal love. Miss Welty welcomed these stories of nuanced carnality, as Frank was careful not to tell her the details. One especially hot night under the glow of the big light that hung over his kitchen table, Miss Welty, her upper lip damp, did hint at the feelings she had for one young man long, long ago. Frank had tears in his eyes as she lyrically, elliptically, without ever admitting the depths of her own emotions but not denying them either, told us of a young poet who could obviously still summon a profound sadness within her all these years after he had moved away from Mississippi, from her, and taken up residence in San Francisco and Italy, places more “welcoming to his kind, to yours,” she told us as her voice came to a halt and she perhaps heard only his now lost one in the sudden comfort of her silence. She finished neither the carefully diluted story nor the freshly diluted bourbon in front of her, both making it too dangerous that night, she seemed to reason in her reverie, for her to drive back home to a house forever musty with familial love alone. Years later, my little brother, Kima Mississippi obstetrician/gynecologist w