I knew little of this when I was growing up and learned it piecemeal, in fits and starts, during that time after my mother’s first hospitalization for leukemia. The sources were varied and surprising, but the main one became my mother herself. Cancer enabled her to confront a past shockingly bereft of moments of grace. To Lucy, my father looked high-born and pretty. He appeared to be her best chance to escape a predestined and dreary life and she took it without giving it much thought. Since she had no background at all, Lucy turned all her bright powers of imagination to the task and made one up. When she had to, she invented her own autobiography and when it proved good enough for Johnson Hagood, she incorporated it, word for word, into the story she always told about herself.
My father took Lucy O’Neill at her word and told his parents he had married a dancer from Atlanta who was perfecting her art as a member of the corps de ballet. In 1947, Atlanta did not have a ballet company functioning within the city limits, but our father would have had no way of knowing that particular cultural fact. Lucy O’Neill had an offbeat nuanced kind of beauty that had sprung naturally out of a weedy gene pool heavily posted with warning signs. But it was her figure that drew men to her, those surprising curves that make words like “voluptuous” explode on the tongue with the sweetness of tropical fruit. I have always suspected that my father married the shape of a woman and had not a clue about the nature of that woman herself. He knew she was raw and unschooled, but had no idea she was illiterate. What captivated him was that he thought he saw in her a brightness of pure spirit. But, in fact, he was marrying Lucy O’Neill to hurt his mother and had succeeded beyond his wildest capacity for vengeance. Ginny Penn Sinkler McCall pronounced Lucy “pure trash” the moment she laid eyes on her.
But a burlesque show is not a bad university for a sixteen-year-old girl who has never been to school to earn a degree in the behavior of men. In her world, a woman had to understand the alphabet and text of lust and the lines were easily learned and put to use. Lucy always had an advantage over those combed and pampered women she would later meet in Waterford because her knowledge of men came from the bottom and not from the top. She knew the boys, beer-sodden and screaming in the sawdust for her to take off her bustier and sticking dollar bills in her garters, and did not know the ones in their tuxedos talking about the poems of Sidney Lanier at fraternity parties during the spring. Her view of men was one-dimensional, but not inaccurate: men were prisoners of their genitalia and women were the keepers of the keys to paradise. Her theories about the relationship between men and women were brutally frank and animalistic, and she never changed them during her whole life. At parties, when she moved toward the lines of conversant men, every woman in the room fastened eyes upon her with malignancy and wonder. Though she lacked all polish and refinement, no one understood the basics any better than Lucy McCall.
On the first day she met him, Lucy created for Johnson Hagood her past as an only child in a respected Atlanta family. She had grown up in a Tudor-style house on 17 Palisades Road in the Brookwood Hills section of Atlanta. Her father had been a member of the King and Spaulding law firm, which was known as the only Catholic law firm in the city, and he specialized in trust funds. Her mother, Catherine, had been related to the Atlanta Spauldings on her mother’s side and both her parents were members of Sacred Heart Church and her mother had been the first Catholic member of the Atlanta Junior League. Both had been killed in a train wreck in nearby Austell when Garner O’Neill tried to race a train to a crossing.
Lucy was sent to live with a maiden aunt in Albany, Georgia, whom she hated. She had run away from home when she was sixteen and hitched a ride to Atlanta from a farmer delivering eggs to the farmer’s market. From 1947 to 1986, this was the official version of Lucy’s history and not a word of it was altered for any reason.
The story was a real one told to her by an older stripper who had been Garner O’Neill’s mistress for years, before a train accident took his life and his wife’s. Whenever her husband or children asked Lucy questions about her parents, she wept so copiously and spontaneously that all lines of scrutiny or inquiry were cut off at the source. From this, my mother learned the power of both stories and tears. The tragic death of the O’Neills formed the outline of the story she claimed to have lived, but had not. She remained faithful to this story, which gave her more than a passing acquaintance with the soundness of the contrived and made up, the irresistibility of fiction.
Ginny Penn McCall, who had grown up among the Charleston Sinklers and who knew in her bones the subtle secrets of breeding and refinement, spotted Lucy for the phony she was at first sight. By listening to her accent, Ginny Penn could tell that Lucy had not been raised in Atlanta, much less born into a distinguished family. Ginny Penn declared that first evening to her husband that Lucy “was nothing but trash, pure white trash, and I don’t believe a single word about her parents or any train wreck at the Austell Crossing.” Lucy, knowing she had not fooled Ginny Penn, then set about to win the affection of her father-in-law, Silas Claiborne McCall.
He was famous as a hunter and fisherman in the county, and Lucy soon learned that Ginny Penn had never fired a rifle in her life. Leaving her string of sons with Ginny Penn as the seasons passed, Lucy took to the woods with Silas when deer season began and was there in the boat when the shad and the cobia made their runs upstream during the spring to lay their eggs in fresh water. During the winters, they sat together in duck blinds waiting for the flocks of pintails, greenheads, and mallards to land in flooded rice fields. Because she knew the secret passwords that accrued around the selection of tackle and ammunition, Lucy found the gradual seduction of Silas McCall child’s play. Though Ginny Penn complained from day one that Lucy did not know the difference between Grecian sterling and Rogers silverplate, Silas bragged that his daughter-in-law could cast a line as far as a man and could track a wild boar through a black water swamp. Ginny Penn’s complaints about Lucy were similar to the ones she had once made about Silas. When Silas set about measuring the character of a stranger, Ginny Penn would check the china cabinet for theft. Silas pronounced to the town that he thought his daughter-in-law was a “good ol’ girl.” That was the highest recommendation among a certain order of Southern men and the thing that Ginny Penn would always hate most about my mother.
In the fall of 1948, after marrying Lucy, Johnson Hagood McCall entered the freshman class of the law school at the University of South Carolina in Columbia through the good offices of the GI Bill. He commuted from Waterford, staying in a boardinghouse three days a week, then returning to his wife and hometown for the rest of the week. The war had raised the level of his ambition and he found the study of law easy. He was well structured, rational, and just, and he discovered he had a gift for argument and wordplay. Law school also gave him a chance to mingle with women who had put off their college educations to work in war-related industries. The company of intelligent women was a forgotten pleasure to him, and that first year it made him critical toward Lucy, whose commonness was highlighted by her vivacity and freshness. An early bitterness set in as Johnson Hagood regretted his impulsive marriage and recognized how little an asset Lucy was going to be. He discovered quite by accident that she had never heard of Mozart or Milton or the Holy Roman Empire. Not only was she unlettered, she seemed to possess almost no natural curiosity at all about his study of jurisprudence.
Each day she listened to the radio and he never saw her reading a book or a magazine and she seemed utterly bored whenever he tried to discuss a thorny problem in contract law with her. When he told her he wanted her to enroll in some college courses to broaden herself, Lucy told him straight out that all her energies and attention would be devoted to the care of her children. If he wanted a college-educated woman, he should have thought about that before he married her. Lucy’s happiness with her pregnancy was so touching to Johnson Hagood that he let himself be carried away with the childlike sense of mystery she brought to the task. His capitulation sealed a
lifelong pattern between them. The child in Lucy seemed always to reign over the man in my father. “Watch out for vulnerable women,” my father would later tell us. “Vulnerable will get you every time.”
The pregnancy forced Ginny Penn to action. She practically abducted Lucy to Charleston for a month and conducted a crash course in the customs and courtesies of Southern life. Admonishing Lucy to observe and not to speak, Ginny Penn imparted a basic knowledge of silver, china patterns, table manners, small talk, and codes of conduct during those four weeks of intensive training. In that period, Ginny Penn learned to her dismay that Lucy came from even lower orders of the white South than she had intuited.
At Henry’s Restaurant on Market Street, Lucy had studied the menu with care and concentration and then had ordered the same thing Ginny Penn did each and every meal. Ginny Penn thought this showed little imagination or spunk, but it did show a willingness to learn and Lucy’s gift for mimicry approached the heroic.
To Ginny Penn’s surprise, she found that Lucy was a quick study. When they returned to Waterford, Lucy could hold a fork properly and cut a piece of meat on a Wedgewood plate without drawing attention to herself. She could set a table for ten and knew what to do with a salad fork as well as a fish knife, and understood the difference between a red wine glass and one for white wine. Ginny Penn also taught Lucy how to prepare seven different meals for each day of the week, since Johnson Hagood had complained that Lucy couldn’t boil crabgrass. Though not renowned for her own cooking, Ginny Penn had been well schooled in the basics and she had been taught to cook in the distinctive and serious Charleston way. She even imparted to Lucy with great ceremony her secret recipe for crab pilau, a low country dish pronounced with a Huguenot inflection as “purr-low.” Cooking, she taught Lucy, was one sure way to discern refinement in a woman. To take cooking too seriously was a sign of discontent, but to have mastered seven unassailable meals that impressed both the palate and the eye was the mark of a serious woman who knew how to get by with just enough.
Soon after she returned to Waterford, Lucy McCall and her husband rented a charming but shabbily renovated slave quarters behind the house of Harriet Varnadoe Cotesworth. Johnson Hagood had to use every ounce of grace and eloquence he possessed to rate an interview with the reclusive Miss Cotesworth, who was one of a long line of oddballs, a species indigenous to the small-town South. She was a rancorous woman with a strong cast toward paranoia who had long been feared in town. Her house had not been painted since the 1920s, and to earn money, she sold off pieces of her family’s antique furniture one at a time to Herman Schindler, an antique dealer from Charleston. She agreed to rent to Johnson Hagood because she desperately needed the money and knew that he was related to the Sinklers of Charleston. She made the deal through a half-opened back door and without looking at the face of the man she had rented to nor asking the name of his bride.
Left alone for much of the week as her husband attended law school in Columbia, Lucy began a long slow courtship of Harriet Varnadoe Cotesworth and she used all the tricks she had learned in her in-service training in Charleston. She picked flowers, both wild and cultivated, and arranged them in simple glass vases, then left them on Harriet’s back doorstep. Whenever Lucy shopped, she made sure that she bought extra tomatoes or cucumbers or whatever was in season for her landlady. Whenever she made biscuits or baked bread, she made extra for Harriet. There was no guile to this and no motive, but Lucy was as lonely and cut-off in Waterford as Harriet Cotesworth.
While Harriet did not allow Lucy to see her in the first month of the McCalls’ residence in the slave quarters, Harriet accepted the gifts of flowers and food. She fastidiously penned thank-you notes on thirty-year-old stationery that Lucy cherished, but could not read. Johnson Hagood would read them aloud for her when he returned home for weekends and Lucy would claim she loved the sound of his voice reading words so delicately strung together. Soon Lucy began to set tasks for Johnson to perform around Harriet’s house. One weekend she had him repair Harriet’s dangerously undermined front steps. On another, he talked Harriet into letting him up on the roof where he spent two days patching a leak. He was skilled with tools and Harriet soon emerged from her solitude and began to depend on him as a handyman. But it was to Lucy that she lost her heart.
Once, after seeing no sign of life or movement at Harriet’s for several days running, Lucy pushed open the back door and entered the mildewed, decaying wreck of a house. Furniture was piled to the ceiling in some of the rooms, but Lucy followed a path through the furniture that led from room to room until she came to a beautifully carved circular stairway.
The house felt as if it were underwater and the mildew had an iodine smell like a bed of kelp. A bit of flowered wallpaper came off in her hand as she began to climb the stairs calling, “Miss Cotesworth, Miss Cotesworth.” When she finally got to the master bedroom, she pushed open the door and saw Harriet Cotesworth passed out on her bedroom floor lying in a pool of her own urine.
When Harriet awoke in her bedroom that night, Lucy was with her and she told the older woman that she had double pneumonia, but that old Dr. Lawrence had given her a huge dose of penicillin and thought they had caught the disease in time. Lucy had cleaned up the bedroom and had placed fresh flowers everywhere. She had disinfected the bathroom and changed the linen and thrown open the curtains to sunlight for the first time in years. But Harriet was far too weak and disoriented to complain about anything. Though her blue eyes were suspicious and fearful, she was not conscious long enough to make a scene. When she awoke again, Lucy spoon-fed Harriet homemade vegetable soup.
Lucy nursed Harriet through her bout with pneumonia and did it with grace and good cheer. In those two weeks the Waterford-maligned Miss Cotesworth found the daughter she never bore and in the last two years of Harriet’s lifetime Lucy learned how a daughter is supposed to act when a mother figure lies dying before her. Both brought sufficient wounds from their own pasts to make up for the extraordinary abyss that separated them socially.
Harriet continued the process that Ginny Penn had begun in Charleston and began to teach Lucy some of the traps and perils she would encounter during her life in Waterford. The older woman told Lucy of the secrets and scandals that had disfigured the histories of the old families of Waterford. There was nothing like a scandal to demythologize the sheen and vigor of a grand old South Carolina name. She proved this by telling Lucy about the fall of a dozen distinguished families whose patriarchs and sons could not keep their hands off girls from the lower classes. Though Harriet was telling the same story that had befallen Johnson Hagood, she did not seem to make the connection, for her growing affection for Lucy had blinded her.
On November 5, 1948, I was born in an upstairs bedroom of the Varnadoe Cotesworth house in the four-poster bed where generations of both Varnadoes and Cotesworths had been born. I was christened Johnson Varnadoe Cotesworth McCall at Harriet’s insistent urging, and Lucy was delighted to comply since the name infuriated Ginny Penn. All Waterford laughed when Lucy bestowed this honorable, tongue-twisting name on her firstborn son, but Harriet Varnadoe Cotesworth wept with happiness. It had been her intention to name a son after her beloved father and she’d finally lived to see this wish consummated.
The Varnadoe Cotesworth in the central nervous system of my baptismal name caused me great discomfort during my childhood because the whole town knew that I was no Cotesworth and had never laid eyes on a natural-born Varnadoe. My passport and driver’s license identified me always as John V. C. McCall and during the Vietnam War I claimed to campus activists at the university that my parents had named me for the Viet Cong. Throughout my life, it was only with a rare friend or deep in the middle of a drunken evening when I would reveal, with shame and apology, the pretentious midlands of my given name.
For six months Waterford laughed at Lucy’s grandiosity until Harriet died suddenly in her sleep. The laughter stopped forever when Harriet’s will was read and everything she owned, including th
e Varnadoe Cotesworth house, went to Johnson Hagood and Lucy McCall.
Ownership transfigured Lucy. She loved the size and shape and simple grandeur of the house where she would raise her children. The house imparted to my mother a passion for beautiful architecture, an uncanny eye for antiques, the habits of a gardener, the compulsiveness of a birdwatcher, and a love of the sound of rainwater tap-dancing on an oxidized tin roof during a summer storm. Both she and my father restored the rundown overload of antiques they found in the rooms and halls and attics throughout the house. The house brought them together in a way nothing else had done, not even my birth.
The Varnadoe Cotesworth house was a valediction of my parents’ queer union, but the story behind their unexpected inheritance transfigured my mother and made her feel that she might be in the middle of living out a lucky life despite everything. Lucy called it the greatest story ever to come out of the South and told it to those reverential clusters of tourists who would traipse through our house each year in the Spring Tour. My mother would dress up in Southern crinolines, her bare shoulders pretty in the candlelight, and give the visitors a brief history of her house before she blew their socks off and changed the Spring Tours forever by relating the story that Harriet Cotesworth had told her in the days leading up to my birth.