PYTHIA NOLAN’S PALATIAL antebellum mansion stands on eighty-eight forested acres in the middle of Natchez. Called “Corinth,” it’s one of the few great houses still in the hands of the family that built it. As a rule, I don’t like Greek Revival mansions—especially the local variety, bland boxes with columned porticos—but Corinth was built on the scale of an authentic Greek temple, and its craftsmanship is beyond replication in our era.
The estate’s wrought-iron gate stands twelve feet tall and is usually closed, but today I find it open, with Darius Stone, Pithy’s driver, waiting for me in a fifteen-year-old Bentley. After I drive through, Darius closes the gate and follows me up the paved private road to the house. The driveway is probably half a mile long, and it winds through acres of oak and elm trees bearded with Spanish moss. Half a dozen Hollywood production companies have begged to use Corinth in their films, but Pithy has never allowed it.
As the mansion comes into sight, I see Xerxes, Darius’s aptly named son, operating a truck-mounted auger near a line of shrubs. His dark muscles ripple in the fading light, but because of the roar of the tool’s motor, he doesn’t look up until I’m almost past him. Recognizing me, he waves, then goes back to work.
Flora Adams awaits me at the front door. One of the few maids in town who still wear a uniform, Flora has the imperious manner of an exiled queen. She’s always driven a Lincoln Town Car—one that belongs to her, not her employer—and her three sons all graduated from college, courtesy of Pithy Nolan. Flora also owns a fine two-story house in town, which Pithy gave her twenty years ago. After Pithy fell ill, Flora chose to live in Corinth’s renovated slave quarters for convenience’s sake.
“She said bring you right up,” Flora says, holding open the door. “She’s had a rough couple of days. She misses Dr. Cage something terrible. I believe she misses you, too, though she’d never admit it.”
As Flora leads me to the grand staircase, I recall a story my mother told me about Pithy Nolan. Pithy achieved fame—or infamy, depending on one’s prejudices—in the late 1960s, during a historic Garden Club meeting. The issue in question was whether to terminate the practice of serving refreshments during the annual Spring Pilgrimage tours, since new federal laws would allow “people of color” to actually tour the great southern mansions—homes they had previously been allowed in only as slaves or paid servants. Carried to its logical conclusion, this practice might result in southern ladies of good family actually waiting upon “Negroes” at table. (“Oh, the horror!”) This discussion, prickly at first, quickly became heated, with the majority clamoring to do away with refreshments altogether. After twenty minutes of squabbling, Pythia Nolan stood up and cleared her throat.
As a “homeowner,” she enjoyed special status in the Garden Club. But unlike many homeowners who were “house poor,” Pithy Nolan still had wads of cash. And not only did she own one of the city’s crown jewels, but she also had an impeccably blue bloodline dating back to the Revolutionary War. Pithy was a past president of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a summa cum laude graduate of Bryn Mawr, and the widow of a war hero. Furthermore, she had the brass of any five ladies present. So when Pithy Nolan cleared her throat, the room fell silent.
She cast her icy gaze about the room and said, “Heaven spare us from all this jabbering. There’s not one woman here who hasn’t served her own maid supper a hundred times, waited on her hand and foot, and eaten from the same set of utensils. The refreshment service brings much-needed money to this club. So put an end to all this hysteria and move on to something that actually matters. I’m starving.”
The tinkle of a china cup boomed like a thunderclap in the silence that followed Pithy’s radical statement of the obvious. But sixty seconds later, the assembled ladies voted in a landslide to continue the refreshment service, regardless of who might show up. On the outcome of such quotidian skirmishes hinges the march of Progress. Pithy Nolan did more for racial equality that day than a hundred CORE workers marching the streets of Natchez could have managed in a month.
Now, forty years later, she lies in her upstairs bedroom, chained to the oxygen tank that gives only partial relief from her advanced emphysema. Facing imminent death, Pithy finally quit smoking her beloved cigarettes last year. According to Dad, it was Flora who finally cut her off, enduring repeated firings during the process. Pithy eventually rehired her, of course, being unable to subsist without Flora’s ministrations.
I remind myself not to look shocked when Flora opens the bedroom door. Pithy has a regal bearing, even in her sickbed, but she looks much thinner than when I last saw her, and her eyes are frighteningly hollow.
“It’s not you I want to see,” she says in a weak voice. “It’s your father. But come closer. Let’s see if you’ve aged as much as I have.”
Tensing my stomach against the sickroom smells, I move to Pithy’s bedside. Flora motions me to the chair she sits in throughout the day. Half a crocheted comforter lies draped over the table beside it, a gleaming blue needle left in the yarn. Near Pithy’s bed, a heavy funk of old urine, flatulence, and medicinal creams simmers beneath a welcome breath of fresh eucalyptus. Then I see crushed leaves scattered on her bedside tables.
“Don’t stand on ceremony!” she says. “Take a seat. You’ve always been a gentleman, even if you don’t know when to stop writing.”
“Pithy, I—”
“Water under the bridge. Tell me where my doctor is. I’ll tell you every secret I know for ten milligrams of cortisone.”
I can’t help but smile. Dad has probably injected Pithy’s arthritic joints with ten times the legal limit of steroids over the years. Today her skin—which in the oil portrait downstairs glows like fresh cream—looks as thin and fragile as rice paper. Her brilliant blue eyes are clouded, and they look wet, as though someone just administered eyedrops.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know where Dad is,” I confess. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Well, you must think I can help, or you wouldn’t be here. Start talking. I’ll need to get back on my oxygen soon.”