Mother stood at the top of the ladder, scraping wallpaper off the living room walls with a putty knife. Uncle Frank's wife, my Aunt Mary, came through the unlatched screen door without knocking.
She looked up at Mother.
"Louisa, I just want you to know that you'll never have a house as nice as mine." Mother looked down at Aunt Mary, who stood with her hands on her hips, a white leather handbag looped over one arm. She was dressed in a red-and-lavender polka-dotted dress and white sling- backed shoes. "I tell you this now so you get all such thoughts out of your head from the start," Aunt Mary continued.
Mother — married three months and already six weeks pregnant with me — was wearing a sweat-drenched cotton housedress. Scraps and curls of wallpaper lay around the ladder. All afternoon she'd been soaking down the layers of old, stained paper and scraping them off; rose-colored stripes and rosebuds, formal bouquets and baskets of violets, bits and pieces of Richter family history were now strewn on the floor.
Aunt Mary was much older than Mother, who had married the youngest of the three sons in the Richter family. Daddy and Uncle Frank were partners in a produce business. With their sister Bama — her real name was Alabama Margarete — living miles away in Columbia, North Carolina, Aunt Mary was reigning matriarch, and according to Mother she intended to keep it that way.
Mother climbed down the ladder. "Why, Mary," she said in what must have been that sweet tone of hers — ice water running just beneath the words — "a new house is the farthest thing from my mind. I'm just trying to get this dirty old place clean and decent before the baby comes."
She offered Aunt Mary a glass of mint tea.
Aunt Mary declined. Hers was not a social call.
This was one of the first stories Mother told me, and she retold it again and again. This, and how Aunt Mary somehow manipulated herself into the delivery room to watch Mother's manners and restraint dissolve into one scream after another as I wrestled my way out of her tortured body while lightning lit the sky and thunder rumbled like an angry god. "Your birth was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to me," she repeatedly told me.
Mother was twenty-four years old when I was born.
She never stopped talking about what she referred to as the humiliation of Aunt Mary's shocking invasion of her privacy. She claimed that the sight of my aunt's face over my carriage was enough to send me into a fit of screaming. I don't know if Aunt Mary actually scared me or if I picked up on Mother's controlled but ever-present and powerful emotions. I have no memories at all of Aunt Mary in my infancy. Nevertheless, I grew up with Mother's stories of her a part of me as surely as the genes that gave me green eyes and a prominent nose like my father's.
Growing up I had a pleasant relationship with Aunt Mary until Uncle Frank died in a house fire in 1945 and Daddy and Aunt Mary had a dispute about the division of property and the business. After that Aunt Mary forbade her children to relate to us, though her son Peyton and I continued our friendship in secret and her daughter Roberta remained fond of Mother.
As an adult, on a trip back to my hometown — I believe it was in 1970 — I decided to ignore the tension of the years and visit Aunt Mary. I phoned first, and her daughter-in-law said it would be fine for me to visit. Aunt Mary welcomed me warmly. She was lying in bed, smoking a cigarette. Holes from cigar and cigarette burns dotted her lavender satin comforter. Beside the bed a wicker clothes basket held a pile of paperback murder mysteries.
I bent down to hug her, and she opened her arms eagerly.
"I'm so glad to see you, Margaret. Here, sit on the bed beside me," she said as if the past twenty-five years of silence and distance between us had never existed. And in a sense that's true, for that brief visit seemed to erase the past as easily as my teachers had erased numbers and letters from the blackboards in the elementary school around the corner from her house.
Mother and Aunt Mary had a contentious relationship from the time Mother married Daddy until the evening Aunt Mary called her not long after my visit. Mother told me that the two of them talked for nearly two hours, finally making their peace. According to Mother, my aunt died shortly after hanging up the phone.
There were other stories Mother told me about the four years we lived in The Old Home Place before Granddaddy died and we moved to the new house up the street. She told me Daddy was often away on business trips, leaving her alone with Granddaddy and me, and Bubba, my first brother, the new baby who kept her awake with his earaches. One night, when especially tired, she picked him up from the crib in the dark and — missing the rocking chair altogether — fell down hard on the floor beside it. "I just broke down and cried and cried," she said each time she told the story, and each time my own eyes filled with tears. Mother seemed so fragile that I wanted to protect her.
She also told me about the way Daddy always put Granddaddy before her. "He made me sit in the backseat of the car while that old man sat up front with him. Even when I was pregnant." And she told me that after Granddaddy died Daddy kissed the glass over his photograph every day before leaving for work and the first thing on coming home. There was also the framed eight-by-ten photograph of Uncle Frank that stood on a table in the living room of our new house after Uncle Frank was killed in the fire. I would walk away from the picture, then turn around quickly to see if those eyes were still watching me. They always were. They followed me all around the room. I swallowed my fear and told no one.
I don't remember when or how she managed it without Daddy's resistance, but I was relieved when Mother took Uncle Frank's photograph, along with the large-framed photograph of my Aunt Bama's house in Columbia, and buried them under the bedsheets and blankets in the linen closet.
Mother had married into a more eccentric family than she'd realized. I suspect that Daddy had married into a more conservative family than he'd realized. Both had little tolerance of the other's parents and siblings. Grandmother Ledford's voice at our front door was enough to send my father, her son-in-law, fleeing through the back door to his car, and then to the safety of the produce warehouse.
Mother too had difficulty with Grandmother Ledford. Though in her later years she referred to her mother — at that point long dead — as a wonderful person, the tension between the two of them when I was young, until Grandmother's death when I was fifteen, was thick and constant. Mother felt Grandmother to be cold and domineering, and closer to her other daughters. As the fourth daughter in a family with no sons, Mother felt unwanted. She told me how, when she was a young child, Grandmother would sometimes rock her in a rocker on the front porch in the evening. Packs of wild dogs skirted the town, howling. When Mother fussed and wouldn't settle down to sleep quickly enough, Grandmother would threaten: "Hush! If you don't go to sleep, I'll feed you to those dogs."
Mother was also upset about Uncle Frank's cursing and drinking, and Aunt Bama's intrusion into her life. She did more than complain about the occasional beer that Daddy drank at a drive-in restaurant. My birth finally gave her adequate ammunition to fight this rare indulgence. The three of us were together when Daddy reached for the beer he'd ordered. Mother announced firmly: "If you take one sip of that alcohol, I'll give it to the baby as well. I intend to make the baby drink whatever you drink."
Her voice filled with pride. "That was the end of your father's drinking."
Excerpted from The Long Journey Home by Margaret Robison. Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Robison. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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