The Right Thing

CHAPTER 16


“Oh, Annie,” my mother begins, “your father was the bright, golden dream of a near-destitute girl growing up in Lannette, Georgia. That was me.” With a sigh, she then falls silent.

We’re sitting at the kitchen table, cups of steaming coffee in front of us. After all the coffee I’ve had in the last twenty-four hours, my cup is supremely unenticing, but I take a sip anyway. My eyes are burning with fatigue, but I need to hear this.

“You’ve never talked about your childhood very much,” I say. “I always wondered.”

She nods. “It’s not hard to understand why. God knows, I’ve never wanted to call attention to my upbringing. You see, my parents worked in the West Point Pepperell towel mills—lint-heads, they were called. My father, a Black Irish immigrant from County Mayo, could only find work in the bleachery, and my mother was a folder on the third shift. We were tenants in the mill houses then, cheap little four-squares with no insulation but only the bare clapboard siding between us and the weather. The winter wind whistled into those cramped and drafty rooms like a southbound freight, so my father used to stuff old newspapers into the leaking window frames, but the wind found its way inside anyhow. In the wild ravine behind those houses, the mill creek ran gray and greasy with foam curds of soap and factory chemicals. My father’s hands were scarred a permanent fish-belly white from the bleach, and my mother coughed all night long, a racking cough so labored that it woke me up in the dark. In those houses, the walls were thin as glass, and you could see the ground through the holes in the floors.”

She takes a sip of her own coffee, watching me over the rim of her cup as if to see how I’m taking this.

Thanks to my Grandmother Banks’s relentless, corrosive disdain for my mother, I always knew she came from nothing much, but this is a revelation. I mean, I never knew it was that bad. After a quiet moment, my mother goes on.


“It was a hard life. Many times, Annie, we didn’t have much to eat, but my parents made sure that I had oranges, milk, and meat while they’d make do with bacon drippings on stale bread. Mother lined their own shoes with cardboard when the soles wore out, but every fall she always saw to it that I had a new pair of sturdy oxfords for school. I was a lonely, studious high school senior when my parents died within six months of each other. My father went in a machinery accident at the mill, and my mother from the emphysema—brown lung, the mill workers called it—that she’d gotten from breathing in all that lint, year after year.”

“How old were you?” I ask.

She looks away. “Eighteen, just two months shy of graduating. Far away in North Carolina, all of my mother’s people had turned their backs on her when she’d married a bog-trot Irishman, and my father’s kinfolk were only mysterious names in the family Bible, so when I had to quit the mill house after they died, I rented a miserable little room in town with the hundred dollars Mother had managed to leave me.

“But you should know that although I was an only child, I wasn’t left completely alone in the world. The women at the Reform Methodist church in the next valley got together and held pancake suppers, paper drives, and bake sales to raise money for me. Those good women. They must have known that after my mother passed I would have died, too, if I could. I only knew I wanted out of Lannette. The memories of my parents were too strong there.”

This explains so much—the thundering silence about my maternal grandparents, their utter absence from my life. I’ve always known they died young, but not how miserably they died, how alone my mother had been. Having to rely upon the kindness of strangers must have galled like acid.

“But I thought you and Daddy met at Tulane, where you were both in school,” I begin. “How . . .”

My mother looks out the window and compresses her lips. “I’m getting there. My scholarship from Newcomb College came through three days after we buried my mother. I worked in the mill myself all that summer, but in the fall, when I set my cardboard suitcase on the gleaming wooden floor of my new dorm room in New Orleans, I couldn’t believe it. I’d never lived anywhere as fine as that small, unassuming space. There was a clean, bare mattress on the iron bed frame waiting for the hand-pieced quilt my mother had sewn from her old dresses, a sunny window overlooking the college’s front lawn. I had my very own desk, too.

“I’d be sharing the closet, though. My roommate’s wardrobe was already hanging there, and my clothes, so proudly made by the churchwomen, were shabby things compared to her beautiful frocks, walking dresses, and suits on scented, padded hangers. She had hats and pumps, court shoes and handbags, and the most darling matched set of luggage—caramel-colored leather covered with luxury liner stickers. Her bed was made up with lovely pink sheets and a matching comforter, and I was just touching the silk bathrobe thrown across the end of it when my roommate walked in the door with a friend, both of them dressed all in white. They were laughing and windblown, while I was wrinkled and worn out after the fourteen-hour bus ride from Lannette.

“ ‘You must be Colleen,’ the tall, blond one said, holding out her hand for me to shake. ‘I’m Tess. Do you play tennis?’ Of course I didn’t—the solitary court in Lannette was at the country club, and only the executives and their wives played there. I was so embarrassed before those two graceful girls in their tennis dresses, embarrassed that I’d been caught out touching something that wasn’t mine.

“But as the semester wore on, Tess became my best friend. We were roommates for three years, and from her I learned how to make my poor clothes look their best and was thrilled to have her barely worn castoffs since we were almost exactly the same size. I bought a secondhand copy of Emily Post and copied Tess’s table manners, trading my hick Lannette accent for her cultured one. And though I was pitifully shy at first, I learned soon enough how to talk to boys because they all flocked to her like bees to a branch of pear blossom. She had the knack of making everything seem so, so . . . easy. Tess was the best thing that had ever happened to me, until I met your father.”

My tired ears perk up. I’ve heard at least this part of her story before. “You had a terrible cold. When you went to the infirmary, that’s when you two met.”

My mother smiles. “Your father was the handsomest man I’d ever seen that wasn’t in a picture show—tall and slender, with thick silver-gilt hair and perfect white teeth. When he smiled and shook my hand, his cool hand was clean, with long fingers and even, trimmed nails.

“ ‘I’m Dr. Banks,’ he said.

“ ‘You seem awfully young,’ I blurted, and then wanted to crawl under the examining table for being so forward.

“ ‘Third-year resident,’ Dr. Banks said. He was unwrapping a tongue depressor. ‘Doing a little moonlighting before I finish my last stint in pediatrics. You just might be the last grown-up head cold I treat before I’m up to my eyeballs in diaper rash and whooping cough. Now, let’s take a look at your throat.’ ”

My coffee cup’s empty, but I don’t move to get up and get another. “So it wasn’t love at first sight, the way Daddy used to tell it?”

My mother shakes her head. “Oh, no, Annie. You see, back in Lannette, I’d walk to school as the sun came up. I’d cross over the railroad tracks with the folks working the second shift, but then, even though it was out of my way, I used to turn and take North Street so I could get a glimpse of all the big, beautiful houses where the mill executives, the banker, the doctor, and the owner of the car dealership lived. Their houses were built of bricks or smooth plaster, surrounded by oak trees, dogwoods, and maples, boxwoods and English ivy, set high above the street on green hills with lawns tended by armies of yardmen. I’d walk up North Street in my cheap skirts and blouses, in the awful shoes my mother had sacrificed for me to have, and clutch my books to my chest while I imagined that one day I’d own a home like this one, or that one, dreaming of having a maid and a closet full of pretty clothes to wear. I dreamed of children—well-behaved children who’d go to good schools. I dreamed of the professional man I’d marry, a banker or a lawyer, or best of all a doctor. Oh, before the end of my visit to the infirmary that afternoon, I knew your father was the one I’d been dreaming of, the man who could be the door to that life. Lord, he’d hold the door open for me, and we’d walk through it together with me on his arm.”

This comes as less than the revelation I thought it was going to be, but inside I ache for the girl she was, longing for what she’d never had. My mother, however, smiles and goes on.

“The only problem,” she says, “was that Dr. Banks hadn’t acted like he was interested in me at all, except for having the worst head cold he’d ever treated. He even got out a fancy camera and took pictures of my red, swollen throat to show his department head.

“ ‘Take these pills,’ he said, ‘and if you don’t feel better in a couple of days, come back to see me. I’ll check you for strep.’

“I wasn’t about to give up, not when I’d just met the man of my dreams, and so I was looking my best when I went back to the infirmary two days later. That morning, I was wearing my favorite of Tess’s sweater collection—a cherry-red cashmere—and a fawn-colored wool pencil skirt, imitation lizard pumps, and had brushed my hair until it shone like black glass. My string of pearls could have passed for real unless you looked too closely. When Dr. Banks walked in the examining room, his eyes widened.


“ ‘You seem to be much improved, Miss O’Shaunessy,’ he said.

“ ‘Oh, but I’m not,’ I said earnestly. ‘My throat’s still scratchy.’ He seemed unconvinced, but once again, he shone a light down my no-longer-scratchy throat.

“ ‘Hmm.’ Dr. Banks’s eyes met mine, and at once I understood that he knew I was only pretending to be sick. He turned away and threw the tongue depressor into the wastebasket. ‘You’re doing fine,’ the man of my dreams said, sounding depressingly cheerful. ‘When you get back to your dorm tonight, gargle with warm salt water. That should fix you up.’ He smiled, but I shook my head in denial.

“ ‘Tonight? I can’t go back to my classes, not feeling like this.’ I fluttered my eyelashes, pouting like Tess did when she wanted a boy to sit up and take notice of her.

“Dr. Banks’s smile turned serious. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course you can’t. I’m taking you downtown to Tujague’s for dinner and then to the Joy for the double feature. You can have that salt-water gargle after I drive you home.’

“Well, he didn’t try to kiss me good night after our first date, nor on our second, but by our third date I’d realized he was a little shy when he wasn’t wearing his white doctor’s coat, so I kissed him instead. I still don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t, but I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

“ ‘Hubba, hubba,’ Dr. Wade Banks said to me, his eyes wide. Then he kissed me back. Thoroughly.”

Her face is soft, almost dreamy with that memory, but then she looks at me and her gaze is sharp. “We were engaged four months later.”

I’ve never heard any of this. When Daddy talked about their meeting, he always made it sound as though he and my mother were wild about each other from the start. What bravery my mother had, risking everything to capture the man of her dreams. She was also, I realize, more than a little cold-blooded about it, and this makes me look at her with new eyes.

Coffee finished, we move to the living room, where it’s more comfortable. I curl up on the sofa with Troy, and my mother goes to the window, looking out at the afternoon.

“He asked me to marry him when we were parking in his Jaguar under the oaks in City Park,” she says, her expression faraway. “Your father had considered giving me a ring that had been his mother’s, but he said, ‘I want you to have your own, one that’s never belonged to anybody but you. Let’s go to Adler’s on Canal Street and you can pick it out.’ I was thrilled and more than a little scared of the high-wire act I had to perform now that we had wedding plans, but when I wasn’t studying or waiting for envious girls to call up and say Wade was waiting for me downstairs, I began to let myself think about floor plans and gardens, of my three beautiful children, my doctor husband. My dream was so close I could almost taste it.

“ ‘You want to watch out for his mother,’ Tess warned me one afternoon. We were lying on my bed, looking at her movie magazines together, leafing through the pages. ‘I’ll bet you a nickel she’s not going to be thrilled about her darling baby boy getting hitched.’ ”

My mother glances at me and raises a sardonic eyebrow. For sure, I can imagine Grandmother Banks blowing a gasket at the news. “Don’t I know about that!” I say, rolling my eyes.

My mother smiles grimly. “Well, at the time I didn’t. It was spring in New Orleans, the window was open, and the scent of jasmine and the trill of mockingbird song floated into our dorm room on the warm breeze. That morning was too pretty for me to worry about anything except where I was going to get the money to pay for a wedding gown.

“ ‘Why, I’m sure we’re going to get along famously,’ I said to Tess, feeling confident. ‘To hear Wade tell it, she’s an old-fashioned southern lady with loads of friends. She’s supposed to throw these great parties. In fact, Wade says she wants to meet me soon, that she’s going to give us an engagement party when we visit up there after he’s finished his residency.’

“Tess, wiser to the ways of the world of my dreams than I was, shook her head. ‘Still, Collie. That southern charm has teeth and claws. I bet she’s a mean old thing.’ ”

My mother sighs and turns away from the window. She walks back across the room to sit down beside me.

“When Tess said that, I wanted to put my hands over my ears,” she says. “In my mind, I could see Mother Banks greeting me on the porch of her mansion with a kiss, sliding her arm around my waist and telling me how thrilled she was that Wade and I had found each other. That’s why when the invitation came in the mail a week later, I felt no apprehension opening the heavy, cream-colored envelope, my name written on it in an exquisite cursive. Besides the handwritten invitation—which, according to Emily Post, was the living end in refinement—inside the envelope was a short note from Wade’s mother, asking me to come up to Jackson a day before the party so we could ‘get acquainted.’

“For three years, I’d managed on the money the church ladies always sent me, a hundred dollars a semester, and that had been enough so that I didn’t have to worry about having a job until summer vacation. It had been enough so that—if I was very careful—I could keep myself in decent clothes and have a little spending money. Tess, however, took one look at the invitation and told me there was nothing in my wardrobe that would pass muster with my future mother-in-law.

“ ‘Here,’ she said, throwing open the door to our closet. ‘Take anything you like. This dress would be fun for the party since I’m sure it’s not going to be a formal affair, probably just family and her intimate friends, and this suit’s perfect, I think, for when you meet the old cat.’ I tried the suit on, but Tess and I were only almost exactly the same size. This summer suit, made of a lovely peach silk poplin, was a bit tight across my bust and derriere. I turned and tried to look at myself from every angle in our mirror, tugging at the jacket and skirt.

“ ‘Hmm. Wear this blouse.’ Tess pulled a white linen blouse with a floppy bow from the closet. ‘You can leave the jacket unbuttoned.’ ”

Remembering how beautifully my mother has dressed since I was a child, I can just see her in her borrowed finery. “I bet you were lovely,” I say loyally, but she shakes her head.

“Oh, no, Annie. Two weeks later, when Wade and I walked up the wide front steps of the Banks mansion, that suit felt all wrong. Worse, when his mother rolled out onto the columned porch in her wheelchair, I could see reflected in her eyes a calculation that left me wanting. She smiled a faint smile, leaving me with no illusions. We were not going to have that moment I’d dreamed of.

“She dangled a diamond-ring-bedecked hand in greeting. ‘Colleen, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard so much about you from Wade, why, I feel like I know you already. You’re exactly as I’ve pictured you. Tell me everything about yourself.’

“Inside, I was cursing my damp palms as I took her hand, but your father must have only heard his mother being kind to a young girl, her beloved only son’s fiancée, because he smiled and kissed the iron-haired woman in the wheelchair on the cheek.


“ ‘Now, Mother—hold off. Collie needs to come in and sit down, have a glass of Easter Mae’s iced tea before she gives you the lowdown. It was a long drive up from New Orleans.’ He squeezed her shoulder and then went out to the Jaguar to bring in our luggage. It was a sweet, disarming thing for him to have said, but old Mrs. Banks’s eyes were flat and assessing, just like a cat’s before it decides if it’s going to eat that mouse or just play with it a while. Without saying a word, her narrow glance at Tess’s peach suit informed me that she knew I was dressed in someone else’s clothes, that I was an imposter.

“Face to face with a nightmare, I almost ran down the walk to the Jaguar, where Wade was unloading my poor old suitcase, to that wonderful car in which we’d shared kisses in front of my dorm. I wanted to ask him to take me back to New Orleans, but I knew he’d be mystified, maybe even think I was crazy because his mother hadn’t said a thing to me that could be construed as anything other than a kindly interest, a warm southern welcome for the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who’d managed to snare her son with trashy, underhanded wiles.

“But even though I was afraid, I knew that I couldn’t let her do that to me. The dream was within my grasp if only I had the nerve to reach out and grab it. I forced myself to smile at her.

“ ‘Thank you for inviting me,’ I murmured. ‘It’s so nice to meet you at last, too. Wade and I are so happy.’ Mrs. Banks lifted an eyebrow, as if to acknowledge that the battle had been joined.

“ ‘Come in, do.’ She turned her wheelchair around on the red tiles of the porch with a shrill shriek of rubber tires, turning her back on me. I hastened to hold the front door open for her. She didn’t say thank you, and by dinner that evening, I knew what I was in for. Mrs. Banks had interrogated me mercilessly all afternoon—all under the guise of ‘getting to know you, honey’—until I felt as gray and tired as the mill creek behind our old house in Lannette. Thank the Lord we weren’t just the three of us when we sat down in her gloomy, high-ceilinged dining room, where those old family portraits seemed to gaze disdainfully down at the interloper in their house. Thank goodness Aunt Too-Tai joined us, having driven up from the farm down near Meridian. Her suit was a heavy tweed, an odd choice for May.”

I smile, thinking of how Aunt Too-Tai must have appeared to my mother back then. I know that suit: she still has it. “I bet she was great.”

“Oh, of course.” My mother continues. “In fact, she was much the same as she is now. ‘Collie!’ Too-Tai said in a booming, happy voice, her handshake as strong as a man’s. ‘It’s a great pleasure.’ Wire-thin, gray-haired, and as tall as Wade, she towered over her thin-smiling older sister enthroned in her wheelchair at the head of the table. She said to me, ‘You’re pretty as a speckled pup, girl. Glad to know you.’

“Throughout dinner with its five courses, from consommé to chess pie, Too-Tai told us funny anecdotes about her life on the ‘home place’ while the silent maid served us all. Her friendliness was a bulwark against Mrs. Banks’s constant, sweet hostility offered like poisonous bonbons on a pretty dish. Oh, and thank goodness for Emily Post, too. Before I’d devoured her book, all those forks and spoons would’ve looked like a silver tiger trap to me. I felt myself beginning to relax, to think that perhaps I was going to win my way through this war, and then Wade’s mother casually mentioned that the help would be starting preparations for the party at six the next morning.

“ ‘We’ve a lot to do to pull this place together,’ she remarked. ‘The flowers, the food, the folding chairs. My friends are helping me out with a few things, but Easter Mae and her cousin Methyl Ivory are going to have to get started at the crack of dawn if we’re to be ready to receive by three.’

“Wade groaned. ‘This isn’t going to be one of your crushes, is it, Mother? You said it was going to be a small party.’

“His mother shrugged and rolled her eyes, a picture of helpless charm. ‘Oh, Wade—you know how it is. Once I invited one family, I had to invite all the families. I’m afraid it’s going to be rather a big do.’ Her eyes slid over to mine, and I was startled to realize that, while she sounded like she was composed and pleasantly anticipating the next afternoon’s party, in reality she was more than a little apprehensive.

“Of course she was. Whether I held up to scrutiny or not was going to be her problem, too. If I was trapped, then so was Mrs. Banks because by then I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. You may find it hard to believe, but there was a hard little part of me willing to cut up just so she’d be disgraced along with me. It wouldn’t be hard. I could talk like a hick, gobble the tea sandwiches, and pretend to be ignorant, but that part was the mill girl, the lint-head, the one who resented the fine folks living on top of the hills of Lannette and everyone just like them. I squashed that part of me flat. I couldn’t bear the thought of being a laughingstock even if it would embarrass this cold woman, not when I’d fought so hard for my place at this table.

“We finished dinner after much discussion of the party—the food, the flowers, who was coming and who had sent their regrets—and then Mrs. Banks kissed Wade, gave Too-Tai a pointed reminder that she needed a new dress, and rolled her chair into her elevator to go upstairs to bed. At the foot of the grand staircase, Wade and I shared a quick embrace before he went to stay in the gar?onnière at the back of the gardens.

“ ‘You’re not worried, are you? Why, you’re going to be fine, sweetheart,’ he murmured in my ear. I laid my head on his shoulder and wondered. Before I went to bed in the most intimidating of the guest bedrooms, I unpacked the dress that Tess had loaned me and realized that it, like the suit, was all wrong. The poppy-printed silk sheath was too bright, too daring, and a little too tight for this immense, gloomy old house, with its servants and family silver. As you might imagine, I didn’t sleep well, dreaming of appearing on stage without having learned my lines, wearing the wrong costume—or, worse, no costume at all.

“After a restless night, early the next morning I awoke to the sounds of the rental men delivering the folding chairs, and I sat up in the big half-tester bed in a panic until I came to the grim realization that there was nothing I could do about anything, none of it. I wanted to throw the covers over my head and never come out from under them.

“But then a knock on the door startled me. ‘Come in,’ I said.

“Too-Tai poked her gray head into the room, wearing the same old tweed suit from the night before. ‘Gracious,’ she said. ‘I’m always up early, but this is more noise than a baling machine in high gear. Listen, Isabelle’s going to put Wade to work as soon as he has a cup of coffee. Why don’t you get dressed? We’ll have some breakfast and get out of here. I can show you around Jackson.’

“I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted more. A couple of hours later, we were driving around the town in Too-Tai’s brand-new black Chevrolet. ‘I usually bring the truck,’ she confided. ‘But this time Isabelle swore she’d turn me away if I didn’t wear my good duds and drive the car. Since I was dying to meet you, I’ve had to behave myself.’ I giggled at that.


“Too-Tai glanced at me. ‘It’s good to hear you laugh,’ she said. ‘I was beginning to wonder if you knew how. Tell you what. Let’s go do a little shopping. I’ve only got the one suit, and Isabelle’s laid down the law—I have to wear a dress. I don’t own a dress, and Maison-Dit has got loads of ’em.’ I was too embarrassed to say that I hated shopping when I had no money to buy anything, so we found ourselves at Maison-Dit, being waited on hand and foot by Dolly, Aunt Too-Tai’s saleswoman.”

I can’t help laughing, thinking of Aunt Too-Tai in Maison-Dit. “What did Dolly look like before she became a quilt?” My mother smiles faintly.

“Much as she does now,” she admits. “Maybe not quite so thin. ‘Meet Miss Colleen O’Shaunessy, soon to be Banks,’ Too-Tai ordered the hovering staff. ‘And bring us some coffee, please.’ We were in the Collections Room, sitting on a velvet settee that was fearfully deep and ferociously soft. The headless mannequins showed off dresses I knew were just the thing for this afternoon’s party, and thinking of my all-wrong outfit, I wanted to cry. Meanwhile the saleswoman bustled off to get Too-Tai the plain navy shirtwaist she demanded. Sipping my coffee when it came, wishing for the thousandth time I had money to buy what I needed, I resigned myself to disaster. Jackson’s society folk would always remember me as the girl who wore a flashy cocktail dress to her own engagement party.

“ ‘Just put it in a bag,’ Too-Tai told Dolly when she appeared with the shirtwaist. ‘I don’t need to try it on.’ She must have seen my wistful expression, though, like a child at a Christmas window, for she said next, ‘And I’d like you to bring Collie a few things to try on, too.’

“ ‘Oh, no!’ I was aghast. I couldn’t allow her to do that. ‘I have plenty of clothes. I mean, I already brought a dress for this afternoon.’ Never mind it wasn’t the right kind of dress.

“But Too-Tai shook her head. ‘Let me do this for you, child,’ she said under her breath. ‘I’m Wade’s only aunt, and I want to do something nice for his bride.’ She patted my hand. ‘I’ve never had any nieces to spoil. Please let me do this.’ ”

Smiling at her memories, my mother strokes Troy Smoot’s head and he wriggles with pleasure. “Oh, it was beautifully done. She’d seen the suit the night before, as well as the shoes that were too cheap to keep up with it. In a million years, Too-Tai wouldn’t have dreamed of pointing out that I needed clothes. She was too kind and well-bred for that. I couldn’t refuse, not after she so tactfully offered what I needed more than anything, and so that morning I walked out of Maison-Dit with the perfect dress, a full-skirted grass-green linen that took my breath away because it was so sweet, so demure, and so wickedly fashionable. Too-Tai had insisted I get green linen pumps, too, a green that was as close to dyed-to-match as could be.”

My mother falls silent. Troy rolls over on his back, begging for a tummy rub now that he knows she’s a soft touch. She obliges with a smile.

“So that was all you needed, right?” I ask. God bless Too-Tai.

“Oh, it was a lovely dress,” she agrees, “but I still had the party to get through. Back at the Banks house, we walked in the door to a controlled chaos. Jackson’s gardens must have been stripped bare for Mrs. Banks’s party, for there were masses of flowers in vases wherever you looked. The immense arrangement in the middle of the dining room table was a firework display of daylilies and phlox, early roses, ferns, marguerites, the last of the Dutch irises and tulips, all of them only just contained in a silver urn the size of a laundry basket. And I’ve never seen so much polished silver in my life before or since—epergnes, candy dishes, sandwich trays, a magnificent tea and coffee service, a punch bowl you could take a bath in, and an amazing array of gleaming flatware and serving pieces.

“ ‘Looks like Isabelle’s throwing a party, all right,’ Too-Tai remarked. ‘Good thing it’s not bee season, what with all these flowers everywhere.’ I shuddered at the sight of all those busy servants. It was going to be, as Wade had said, a crush. I took my new dress and shoes upstairs and tried to eat a sandwich for lunch, but couldn’t manage more than a mouthful.

“And so at two thirty, in the relative calm of my room, I was dressed in my new dress and heels, had checked for the fiftieth time that the seams of my hose were straight and that I didn’t have lipstick on my teeth. When there was a knock at the door, I opened it, expecting to see Too-Tai, but it was Wade, carrying a slim black leather box.

“ ‘I was going to give you these later.’ He tugged at his collar, looking nervous. ‘But Too-Tai said I should give them to you now. I hope you like them.’

“I opened the box and found a strand of luminous pearls, heavy and cool as river stones in my hand. ‘Oh, Wade,’ I said softly. ‘They’re beautiful.’

“ ‘So are you. They remind me of your skin.’ He blushed. ‘Look, I know this is going to be an ordeal. This kind of thing always is for me. When mother has these dos, I used to go out and not come back. She’d get mad as a poked snake, but I’d rather that than get dressed up and have to make polite conversation with these folks. Don’t get me wrong—they’re all perfectly nice, but there’s just too damned many of them.’ ”

My mother smiles a radiant smile then. “You know, Annie, I think that was when I finally fell in love. Your father was then, as always, the most thoughtful and generous person I’d ever met. Wade fastened the pearls around my neck, and I felt them settle into the hollow of my throat like they’d always been there, a totally different feeling compared to my imitation strand. In that moment I felt as though I could take on anything, as long as Wade was with me.”

I put my arm around her thin shoulders. “We’ll always miss him,” I say softly.





Later, we’re back in the kitchen, looking for something to eat, which for once is a productive search since it’s Thanksgiving and Myrtistine has cooked up enough food for an army. We sit at the kitchen table with a plate of everything except turkey. I’m probably going to have to get around to cooking it sooner or later, but I urge my mother to keep talking.

“The guests began arriving promptly at three,” she says, “the street in front of the Banks mansion filling up with cars so that people had to park and walk from blocks away. By three fifteen, there was a stream of curious guests waiting on the front steps to come into the house to meet me.

“In the entryway, I stood in the receiving line with Mother Banks on one side and Wade on the other, shaking hands and trying to remember to smile while my feet hurt: my new shoes were pinching my toes. Mrs. Banks must have had a sore neck later that night from looking up at all the guests from her wheelchair, but you’d have never known she was anything but delighted to see everyone.

“ ‘Colleen, I want you to meet one of my oldest friends,’ she’d say. I was introduced to all of two hundred people that afternoon, and they were every one of them her oldest friend. Some of the guests brought wedding presents, too, and I had to open them then and there, handing the wrapping paper to Easter Mae to throw away. Wade and I would say how thrilled we were to receive these sumptuous presents, and then Wash would take them to a long table in the parlor so the other guests could inspect our gifts.


“I’d been standing in the receiving line for what seemed like a century when an older couple came in the door with a girl who looked about my age.

“ ‘Why, how nice of you to come!’ Old Mrs. Banks took the other woman’s hand. ‘And you brought Squeaky, too. Colleen, this is Lydia, but everyone calls her Squeaky. You’re sure to be friends—Squeaky’s going to be a senior, too. Forgive me, dear, I’m old.’ She turned her beaming face up to the girl. ‘I forget where you’re attending college.’

“ ‘The W,’ Squeaky simpered. ‘Where else?’ The chubby girl was referring to the exclusive all-girls school, Mississippi State College for Women, where everybody who was anybody went in those days while they were looking for husbands. She was squeezed into a yellow eyelet afternoon dress that clashed horribly with her pink foundation. Her handshake was as limp and clammy as a wet dishrag.

“ ‘Do you play bridge?’ she asked me peremptorily. It was easy to see how she’d gotten her nickname: her voice was a dead ringer for a needle accidentally dragged across a record. ‘Everybody plays bridge and we’re starting a club.’ Her mother was handing a white paper-wrapped box to Wade, but Mrs. Banks’s glittering gaze was fixed on me, waiting for my answer.

“ ‘I, I’ve always wanted to learn,’ I stammered. In college, I’d never had the time or the inclination. Bridge was for sorority girls, like Tess.

“ ‘Oh,’ Squeaky shrilled, unimpressed.

“Meanwhile, Wade was unwrapping the gift. Thankful for the distraction from my nonexistent bridge skills, I turned to look at the heavy silver object in his hand, a hinged tong-like implement that I’d never seen before. It looked quite a bit like a smaller version of a tool that Wade kept in his alligator doctor bag, so I thoughtlessly exclaimed, ‘How wonderful! It’s a forceps, isn’t it?’ Wade looked at the gift in bemusement, while I gushed on about how useful it would be when he had a difficult delivery. ‘Wade always says you need the right tool for the job!’

“I felt a sharp poke in my side and looked down to see Mrs. Banks’s eyes locked on mine in a terrifying glare of mingled fury and satisfaction. ‘It’s a sandwich scissors, Colleen darling. ’

“ ‘Oh.’ I was so shocked and humiliated I couldn’t think of any reply other than that. ‘Oh.’ What in the world was a sandwich scissors?

“Wade came to my rescue. ‘Good thing,’ he chuckled. ‘I already have a brand-new forceps, but no way to pick up my sandwich.’ Everybody laughed, but inside I was devastated. Easter Mae appeared to take the paper and ribbon back to the kitchen, and Wash took the damned sandwich scissors to the display table, where a hundred gifts were lined up in shining rows of silver. I tried to turn my attention to meeting the remaining guests in the receiving line, to making polite conversation, but inside I relived that awful moment over and over. After the last people had arrived and been greeted, I knew I had to get away. I told Wade I was going to find the powder room.

“ ‘Hurry back, darling,’ he said. ‘I’m going to grab a bite to eat.’ Then he disappeared into the crowd of people who were loading up their plates with chicken salad, ambrosia, and pimento cheese sandwiches from the dining table.

“A disorganized gaggle of ladies was waiting to go into the powder room, so I leaned against the wall to take some of the pressure off my aching feet. One by one, they all went inside while I waited my turn. I don’t think they even saw me, obscured by another one of those outrageous flower arrangements on the hall table. Finally, the bathroom door opened and Squeaky emerged.

“ ‘All yours!’ she squealed as I came out from behind the flowers. I tried to smile, went inside, and shut the door. It was good to sit down and a relief to be away from the party. I had just finished washing my hands when I heard them outside in the hall.

“ ‘She didn’t know it was a sandwich scissors. She called it a forceps!’ It was Squeaky’s unmistakable voice. She giggled, a high-pitched, squealing series of snorts. I’d never heard anything like it.

“ ‘Well, she is from some little hick town in Georgia,’ some other girl replied. ‘I guess I can tell what Wade sees in her, though. She’s certainly pretty enough.’

“ ‘She doesn’t know how to play bridge either,’ Squeaky grumped. ‘Do you think we’ll have to ask her to join anyway?’ And then their voices faded into the background.

“I stared at my reflection in the mirror and wasn’t surprised to find that I was crying, big hopeless tears running down my cheeks in a slow-moving stream. I was always going to be the mill girl from Lannette, never really from Jackson. No one here would ever accept me, no matter what I was wearing. I should go upstairs quietly, pack my bag, and take a cab to the bus station. I should go back to New Orleans.

“I must have stood there in front of the mirror for a long time because finally the tears stopped. Looking at my desperate face, I wiped off their traces but was still unable to open the door. I had to have been in there a while when there was a discreet tapping from the other side.

“ ‘Collie?’ It was Too-Tai. ‘You’ve got to let me in, girl. I need the bathroom right this minute.’ I wanted to act like I hadn’t heard her, but she kept tapping.

“ ‘Collie? I’m afraid to try to go upstairs, I need the bathroom that bad. You’ve got to let me in.’

“What could I do then? I opened the door, and Too-Tai pushed her way inside. There was barely room for the two of us in the low-ceilinged powder room. ‘Honestly, girl,’ she said, sounding exasperated. ‘Why are you holed up in here? People are starting to talk.’

“At that, I broke down again. Bless Too-Tai, she dampened one of the linen guest towels and handed it to me. ‘Wipe your face,’ she said kindly. ‘Here.’ Handing me a wad of toilet tissue, she said, ‘Blow your nose, dear.’ I took the tissue and squeezed it into a ball, unwilling to meet her sharp eyes.

“ ‘You mustn’t let yourself be this way, Collie. If you love Wade, and I know you do, then you’re going to have to hold your head up in this town. You’re going to have to act as though you’re good enough for these folks, even if in your heart you’re sure you’re not. It’s all make-believe, anyway. What’s real is what’s between you and Wade. Now come on out of here and have a chicken salad sandwich, or some cheese straws. Wade’s wondering where you are.’

“ ‘But his mother,’ I said tightly, holding back the tears. ‘She . . .

“Too-Tai snorted in contempt. ‘Don’t you ever forget this, girl. Isabelle Gooch grew up barefoot in a dirt yard on a truck farm that was out from Chunky. Before she married Wade’s father, her claim to fame was that she could kill two chickens at the same time, wringing their necks like a field hand. She comes from the same place you come from—not here.’ She kissed my cheek and walked out of the powder room.

“Wondering, I touched the pearls at my throat, cool and smooth, sweet to me as Wade’s smile. Then I straightened my shoulders, blew my nose, reapplied my lipstick, and went back into that party. I have never cried in a powder room again. That day I learned what make-believe was, but as time passed I also learned how to play bridge, how to entertain, how to pretend that I was as good as anybody, until one day, I realized I wasn’t pretending anymore. I’d found a real life, one even better than a seventeen-year-old girl’s dream. I’d found your father.”


I get up from the table, take our plates to the sink, and run some water over them. “I had no idea,” I say. I’m at a loss for words, really. What a valiant bravery she had, how hard she fought for her dream.

My mother gets up and comes to the sink, turns the water off, and turns my shoulders so that I’m looking her square in the eye. She gazes at me searchingly before she says, “And then you, my own child, my only, beautiful child, wanted no part of this life I’d worked so hard for. You wanted . . . oh, I don’t know what you want, but this obviously isn’t it. You’ve never wanted this life, you’ve rebelled against it, fought it to a draw. You’re terrible at pretending, dear heart. Find your own dream, no matter where it takes you, Annie. You need to be at peace with who and what you are.”

She folds me into her arms and we hold each other tight.