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  The three years I looked after her have been hard. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t bring her peace. I couldn’t make her happy with herself.

  All that heaviness weighs on me, yet the funeral turns out to be a lighthearted homecoming. Mom’s friends, nieces, nephews, former coworkers—they’re all there. The prettiest flower arrangement, in fuchsia, orange, and gold, is from the rich boy she raised as a nursemaid on his parents’ country estate. Two ministers celebrate her life, along with Daddy’s, that sunny day. One of them draws a comic hoot from the crowd when he says that Daddy, a die-hard Democrat, is the only person he ever knew who voted for Michael Dukakis.

  Just as with Ronnie’s service, nobody mentions the single greatest burden of my mother and my brother—her shame over having had him out of wedlock. It wouldn’t be appropriate to bring it up, of course. Most of the funeral crowd has no clue about Ronnie or, when it comes right down to it, any of my mother’s private concerns.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME Mom dies, most of her closest friends are gone, so I don’t hesitate to list Ronnie in her obituary in Charlottesville’s newspaper, the Daily Progress.

  A few minutes before the funeral in the chapel of Mom’s longtime church, Anna, daughter of one of Mom’s dearest, departed friends, motions for me to come to her in the front pew.

  “Mary Carter,” she whispers, her voice full of concern as I bend my head to hers, “there was an error in the obituary. It says she had a son. Adria didn’t have a son.”

  A “hate to break it to you” look emerges on my face, and Anna lifts her head in surprise. “Did she?”

  I’m standing five feet from the open casket, where Mom is laid out in the last piece of clothing she purchased, a white silk jacket embroidered with pink and turquoise butterflies. I nod to Anna.

  Anna digests this, then asks, “My mom knew, right?”

  Anna’s mother was as understanding as anyone Mom ever came across. She radiated empathy. If she’d learned Mom’s secret, she would have embraced Mom all the more. But I shake my head. No, she never knew.

  * * *

  A DOZEN DAYS after the funeral, I dream that I’m standing downhill from a just-felled tree when it begins to roll. It’s too big for me to jump over and too long for me to run around.

  * * *

  BACK HOME, I began to sift through the things Mom and Daddy had brought to the little house down the street from us. Mom couldn’t bear to throw much away, so from their old house I’d carted Grandma’s cast-iron lard-soap-making tub and Daddy’s grain-musty burlap feed bags. I’d boxed up drawers full of paper scraps and little keepsakes that, though she didn’t often look at them, gave my mother great comfort. Now I was opening them up again. Many days, I sat cross-legged on the floor by Mom’s living room recliner. Her curly silver hairs drifted from boxes and fell to the carpet as I sorted through it all.

  I found notes from her throughout. “The little hat I wore when we were married 1942,” she wrote on a torn piece of envelope placed over the flattened hat of silk flowers.

  “Mary Carters [sic] baby clothes” was on an index card atop a pink-and-blue blanket, embroidered little dresses, flannel gowns, and white leather baby shoes.

  “The white hat with roses I wore when Mary Carter finished college” was attached to another squashed hat.

  “Buttons for Daddy’s Harris Tweed sports coat,” she’d written on a paper scrap in an envelope with the leather buttons, as if she meant the note for me. She’d been so proud she could buy him such a classy jacket.

  I kissed the old church bulletins and magazine clippings about African violets as I dropped them into the recycling box.

  Just as Ronnie had done, Mom wrote her new address and phone number on stray paper napkins, receipts, and business cards. Uprooted from Charlottesville, she needed to be ready when somebody called and wanted to know where she was. She wasn’t always sure.

  Crying out from the piles of hand-copied recipes and bus trip brochures and yellowed, perfectly ironed white linen napkins was what she wanted most for everyone to know: Adria Bishop tried to be good. She was a responsible woman. She was well behaved, an upstanding citizen.

  I recognized this demonstrative clutter from somewhere else. Ronnie left behind a similarly intentional mess. Among the Hardee’s wrappers, I had found receipts for laundered towels for shaving customers long in their graves, dealer sales slips for a long line of used cars, and tax scribblings from the mid-twentieth century.

  But I was determined to push behind these facades. In my mother and my brother, I’d witnessed a connected misery. They were entwined in a dark and irresolvable way. They could neither be close nor break free of each other. They were anxious and self-doubting, in much the same way. I wanted to know what happened to them all those years ago, why they’d wandered off from each other.

  I needed to know why my mother had let Ronnie suffer when I had it so good. I wanted to be able to fully love her again, and to understand what it had meant to me, always sensing her shame and only recently learning clues to its origins.

  I began to track my mother’s history and Ronnie’s. He kept everything. She kept everything. I kept what they kept, and I was a reporter. I dug into the poverty of Mom’s upbringing and the extreme wealth of the place where she had come to work as a young woman, the old plantation where I’d grown up as a servant’s child and where she and Ronnie lived together the longest. The landed gentry there played a role in Ronnie’s story, and I researched the individuals who sent him off to his final institution.

  I raced to interview elderly people who knew Mom or Ronnie. I mined thirty years of my journals and indexed the thousands of pieces of their stories. I pulled together documents from the orphanage, the reform school, and the mental hospital that all had detained Ronnie.

  He never knew his father’s name. I found that name long after Ronnie and Mom were gone, and I went looking for the man.

  This book grew from a decades-long effort to shine light on the darkest corners of my family’s life, to dwell in the contradictions of the relationship between my mother and her secret son. The story of my mother and my brother, and the private shame they shared, is also the tale of the cruel world that shaped them. Their story sheds light on the difficult, punishing mores of the American South in the twentieth century. In these pages, I consider our lives and the society that made us who we all were. I did my best to move beyond the whisperings and the lies and the expectations of a culture I cannot condone, yet it haunts me still. I am left to tell the story in all its complexity.

  * * *

  WITH A MAGNIFYING lens one afternoon, I was studying photographs from Mom’s first months with baby Ronnie. For her camera, she posed him on blankets in the grass and on chairs out in a yard. From one album, I pried a small picture of Ronnie at almost five months old. He’s on a wooden bench outside in a sweater, diaper, and leather booties. He’s squinting in the sun.

  On the back of the picture she’d written, “Sweetest thing on earth.”

  Part II

  The Parents Who Raised Me

  3

  My Mother: Gentle Hands and Foul Moods

  Mom, Daddy, and me at my uncle’s house in Northern Virginia when I was about a year old.

  My mother’s hands made my life. They churned our butter, kneaded our biscuit dough, checked my head for fevers, delicately plucked gravel from my knees, and when I had a cold, dabbed the medicinal reek of Vicks VapoRub on my chest from the cobalt-blue jar. At her side in church, I’d twirl her wedding rings around her finger and play with those soft hands. On long rides home from out of town in the farm pickup, I’d sprawl across her wide lap and doughy body. I lounged on her as if she were my couch.

  Adria slowly made a bright home out of the weathered century-old place we got to live in when my father became manager of the farm. As Arthur Godfrey plucked his ukulele on the radio atop the fridge, she bleached cotton feed sacks in a big tub outside the open back door and sewed them into co
arse, heavy bedsheets. She dyed some of those sacks red to fashion my red-and-white Mrs. Claus costume for the school pageant. I feared the other farm families like us in the audience would recognize the humble cloth and look down on me.

  She’d often be reduced to dimes and nickels, but she was too proud to admit it. We’d hide in the bathroom and cup our hands over our ears as salesmen peddling brushes or vanilla extract pounded on our door.

  My second-grade teacher sent word home that I couldn’t read the blackboard and was holding books inches from my face. The eye doctor prescribed glasses and a yolk-yellow liquid vitamin A in a dark-brown bottle. Every evening Mommy faithfully fed me a teaspoon. She and Daddy struggled to pay for it. I craved the stuff and can remember the taste even now. She kept it on the fridge’s top shelf, out of my reach, and policed that precious potion so as not to waste a drop.

  She was my nurse and my guardian, my manners coach, my hairstylist. But only rarely my playmate. Except for my first rolls of a ball and for her storybook readings as I fell asleep, she never played with me. I was her beloved project. Her job was to feed, clothe, and protect me, not to entertain me. Her nervous, chicken-blinking blue eyes were forever turned in my direction.

  * * *

  IN THE BACKYARD one warm evening before supper, Daddy was helping me learn to walk along the top of the three-board fence that separated our yard from the cow pasture. I envied the nimble fence-walking of other kids. Daddy, once a daredevil boy, was lightly touching my outstretched hand as I stepped foot over shaky foot on the narrow board. “You’re doing good, Pie.” That was his nickname for me, short for Sweetie Pie. “Don’t be scared. You’re gettin’ it.”

  Out the back door and down the steps Mommy flew. “Mary COD-ah! Get down from there right now! You’re gonna fall down and break your neck!” (She said that often.)

  Daddy shook his head. “Swee-dart, you worry too much. She’ll be all right. Let the child play.” She’d squelched my other athletic efforts—tree climbing, balancing at the edge of brick walls, and pumping myself so high in my swing that I almost flew backwards over the tree branch that held it.

  I crouched atop the fence, deciding whether to defy her. She’d shaken me up. I’d surely lose my balance now. Finally, I crawled down and slinked away, pouting. I never learned to walk a fence.

  * * *

  DREAD OF COMING disaster ruled my mother’s life. She never learned to drive, but from the passenger side of the truck, she squealed whenever Daddy approached an intersection or when vehicles shot past us. “Earl-LEE!” she’d scream my father’s name in a crescendoing screech. “Watch OUT!” Her right foot wore a hole through the truck’s floor mat from slamming into her imaginary brake. Each time before we went out, she’d park herself in front of her electric stove and intone, “Off-off-off-off-off,” pointing to each switched-off burner knob, plus the oven’s, to be sure.

  In a crowd, Adria Bishop, at five foot eleven and nearing two hundred pounds, was almost always the biggest woman. She stood erect with long, spongy arms and legs. She was curvaceous, with a narrow waist. Warm when engaging with people, on guard and blinking the rest of the time, her expression oscillated between welcoming and forbidding. Her brown hair was thick, permed, and sprayed.

  She hated her body and compared herself unfavorably to the highly polished rich women who lived all around us. She fetishized their sharply defined Achilles tendons and bony ankles; her own lower legs were thick and fleshy. She thought her breath was foul, so she sucked cloves. She asked me all my life, “Does my breath stink?” It never did. Her bodily fluids repulsed her, so even when she wasn’t having her period, she kept wads of toilet paper in her crotch. They would fall from her underwear and scatter along our floors, trailing her quiet shame. She found herself so odious that she feared her very biology might contaminate us.

  For some reason, my mother needed for me to be very well behaved. At church, she held rule over the Women’s Circle like a stern, stiff-backed Puritan. There, she always wore her finest, putting on the most upright costume she could scratch together—a hat and a suit, if she could, with a broach at her high collar. At home, she could be jovial, bordering on bawdy, though when I was nine she warned me fiercely, “Don’t you ever let a boy put his thing in you.”

  The tender side of her pitied the sparrows that stunned themselves by flying into her windows. She placed them high on a ledge, away from cats. But her moods could cloud easily. Often she’d stew all day over something, her face in a childish pout. If some woman irked her, say, by asking her to bring a pie to the church picnic when she’d just baked cookies for it, she took strong offense. “Tough tittie,” she’d grumble under her breath.

  She cried a lot of angry tears throughout my childhood. Many times I’d find her weeping alone in the kitchen, her face red, puffy, scary mad. She and Daddy had just exchanged words; about what, I didn’t know.

  I thought she was nuts. Her extremes made no sense. I had no idea how deeply tormented she was, or why.

  4

  My Father: Joy, Wonder, and Self-Hate

  My aunt shot this picture of me, Daddy, and my little cousin in the mid 1950s near backyard outbuildings at our house on Bridlespur Farm.

  It’s the picture I prize above all others. Mommy took plenty of us, but only on Sundays, when we were dressed up, when she felt the proudest of us. My Ohio aunt took this one of me and Daddy as we were most of the time. Looking at it, I hear the crows cawing across the hills; I smell the dusty hayfields that separated us from the mountains; I feel my father’s affection in the squeeze of his strong, callused hand.

  We’re in our backyard, out by the ham house and the toolshed. I’m about eight. I’m in a Saks Fifth Avenue bathing suit tossed out by our boss lady. Its breast cups collapse onto my bony chest. I’m standing between my little cousin and my ball-cap-wearing daddy, who’s in khakis soiled by farmwork.

  When my father wasn’t baling hay, wrangling a bull, or doing something else unsafe, I was out on the farm with him or riding beside him in the pickup. He was my fellow explorer, my gentle teacher, my playmate, my partner in fun and wonder.

  Not long ago, the rustle of a brown paper bag in an adjoining room lit up a delicious association I didn’t know was still lodged in my mind: That sound meant Daddy was home with a bag of Atomic Fireballs and little Tootsie Rolls.

  He’d invite me to pull his earlobe, and after a few tugs, he’d bare his teeth, shake his head ferociously, and bellow like a beast. He’d slip his arm up his jacket sleeve and tell me to stick my hand up the dark tunnel at the cuff where he claimed a mouse was in residence. His hand would pinch mine; I’d shriek, and we’d do it over and over.

  When he found a rusty tricycle so old the tires had rotted off, he coiled baler twine around the wheels for my bumpy rides along the farm roads. He hammered straight the mangled rails of a discarded sled and, taking a running start, sailed down a snowy hill in a solo ride to show me how. He sheathed his comb in waxed paper and hummed “Jimmy Crack Corn” into it, harmonica-like. On the Fourth of July, he parked Mommy and me on a dusty road below the bosses’ country club so we could watch their fireworks from the back of the pickup.

  Daddy introduced me to wildness. Back by the mountain, he plucked persimmons for me, golden and tart, and chuckled when my mouth puckered. He explained the strength of tall pecan trees we watched in a hurricane, their giant crowns nearly bending to the earth but the trees not breaking. And he opened my eyes to the profusion of smaller plants that crept over every uncultivated inch of the farm.

  “People fuss about dandelions and wild onions, but Pie, look here.” He ripped away a honeysuckle vine invading his squash patch. He cast his flat hand high above the garden’s edge. “We got sand briars over there. You know, those little thorns that stick in your feet? Here’s some plantain, and look over here.” He pointed to wild violet leaves that had lost their purple-and-white blooms. “See how the earth is determined to cover itself?” If weeds weren’t covering the gro
und, the rains would wash the soil down into the creeks and the rivers and be gone. We’d be down to bedrock with no soil in which to grow our cucumbers and strawberries or to feed the livestock.

  As farmers’ tractors mow the fields and till the earth, they routinely kill wild creatures. Most farmers scoff at the unavoidable slaughter, but my father mourned the rabid opossum he mercy-shot as it hissed at him through foamy teeth. Many an evening, he came to the supper table, his head hung low. In cutting tall hay, he’d sliced into a nest of baby rabbits he couldn’t spy in time to swerve away. Like my mother, my father grieved openly when animals died.

  He named his female hound Sam Catchem after his favorite detective in the Dick Tracy comics, and he called for her with a whistled melody learned from his father—the climactic passage of Messiah’s “Hallelujah” chorus, though Daddy didn’t know that’s what it was. Sam was a runt weeded from the private pens of hounds carefully bred nearby to run alongside horseback foxhunters. Daddy snapped her up as a pup. She was his sidekick as much as I, and she was smart. In killing the groundhogs that devoured Daddy’s crops, she avoided their long incisors by grabbing them first by the tail and spinning them until they were so dizzy she could then attack them head-on.

  Before his question-mark-shaped spine began to collapse and shorten him, Early Lee Bishop was a handsome six-foot tower of tanned strength, with soulful down-turned eyes. A bitter whiff of his sweaty, hay-covered forearms drifted to my nose as he swung me around. His pack of unfiltered Camels made a crushing sound within his shirt pocket.

  I had no way of knowing it then, but he was my first and finest instructor in journalism. He trained my eyes and ears to teach me that there are no truly ordinary people or places, not anywhere, not ever. If you listen closely enough, if you watch carefully enough, you can be astonished by every square foot of this earth.