Excerpt from Book:
1
Thanks to Mattie, my grandfather’s second
wife, I spent my childhood as a small adult.
Mattie had spirited me away from my
alcoholic mother before I was two years old. The
story Miz Johnny told me was that Carmella (my
mother) was living in a two-bedroom trailer on
the outskirts of town when Mattie stopped by one
day to check up on me after my dad and my mom
had split up. Mattie found my mother sprawled on
the couch wearing high heels and a black slip
with an empty Jack Daniels bottle tucked in the
crook of her arm, and me trapped and crying in a
playpen, wearing nothing but a dirty diaper.
Mattie took me away that day, and then sometime
after that – the details get fuzzy – my mother
got on a Greyhound bus and never came back. My
dad lit out for the West Coast shortly after she
left. Granddaddy died of a stroke when I was
four, and I hardly remember him anyway.
That left me and Mattie and Miz Johnny, a
maid whose family had been interlinked with mine
since the days of slavery – not one of us
related by blood but bound together nonetheless
– in a big brick house on a hill in Augusta,
Georgia, a few blocks from the Savannah River.
My dad, Billy Burnes, never made it as far as
the West Coast. He spent a couple of years at
Southern Illinois University before dropping out
to become a D.J. at a Top-40 radio station in
St. Louis. He visited us every Christmas
and usually for a week or so during the summers.
The summer after I turned nine years old, he
brought a pregnant girl named Cleo with him and
said she was his wife. We never saw or heard
from my mother. Mattie never mentioned her. And
who was I to miss a person I couldn’t remember?
Especially when I had Mattie and Miz Johnny.
Mattie spoiled me, and Miz Johnny disciplined me
when she could catch me.
Before marrying my wealthy grandfather, Mattie
had been a world-class opera singer. In order to
entice her in to marrying him, he bought the old
theater in downtown Augusta so she could turn it
into her very own opera house. She was getting
older anyway so she took the offer. While other
kids stayed home at night watching “Bonanza,”
I was at the Southern Opera Guild. For hours I
played dress up in elaborate costumes or had
swordfights with imaginary enemies in the
rehearsal room. During performances I would turn
pages for the pianist or sit in the lighting
booth and read cues for the spotlight man. When
rehearsals ran late, I slept backstage on the
piles of black curtains while the sound of arias
shrouded me like a dream. Sometimes I spied
furtive kissing in the rehearsal room. Sometimes
men kissed other men, sometimes they kissed
women whose husbands were at home, drinking
scotch.
I didn’t have friends my own age, but it
felt as though Mattie’s friends were my friends.
Since I considered myself a small adult, and
they considered themselves large children, we
met somewhere in between. Our house was the
central location for evening parties where they
sang showtunes around the Steinway that Carl
played, hunched over the keys, a cigarette in
his mouth, a highball glass on a stack of sheet
music. I usually stretched out underneath the
piano with my marbles or plastic horses and
created stories till I fell asleep.
When I was twelve, a girl named Gretchen moved
from half-way across the world with her German
father and American mother. She was an outsider,
like me, and for the first time I had a friend
my own age. I liked Gretchen a lot, but the real
attraction was her older brother named Wolfgang,
an aloof philosophical boy with shaggy hair and
bushy eyebrows, a boy who made my teeth sweat
the first time I saw him.
Beyond the borders of our small town, all
kinds of things were going on. Rock music had
conquered the world, men in puffy white suits
were jumping on the moon, a crazy man shot down
Martin Luther King, Jr. and another one gunned
down Bobby Kennedy. After both killings the
house on the hill went into mourning though I
didn’t understand why we cried over the deaths
of men we had never met. There were riots and
revolutions and hippies and Woodstock and all
kinds of things the good citizens of Augusta,
Georgia, tried to ignore, but the world would
not be ignored. It was slouching toward us
inexorably and arrived in a rain of smoke and
ash in May, 1970. But it was not the brutal race
riot that ended my perfect childhood. My perfect
childhood dissolved a few months earlier when
something growing inside Mattie suddenly emerged
and stole the life out of her. I was fourteen
years old.
2
As I stood shrouded in the darkness
backstage, watching Mattie sink to her knees in
the bright spotlight and collapse in a pile of
pink silk, I was not thinking of death or even
of opera. Around her the singers mourned and the
tenor bellowed “Mimi” in a crescendo of notes.
But my mind transposed the scene. Instead of
Mimi and her Bohemian friends, I was the one
sinking to the ground, gazing into the hazel
eyes of Wolfgang, who had finally realized how
much he loved me. He was bending down ever so
slowly to kiss me.
At that moment the curtain closed for the
final time, and the performers came rushing off
stage. Fallene, the contralto, said to Mattie,
“No one dies as brilliantly as you do,
Mathilda.”
Then Mattie stood in front of me, her
eyes sparkling full of spotlights, her hands
clasping mine.
“How did you like the performance,
precious?” As if the applause wasn’t enough. She
always needed my approval. I always gave it. I
may have become a teenager without either of us
expecting it, but I still adored her.
“Brillant,”
I said, stealing Fallene’s word because I hadn’t
fully collected myself back out of Wolfgang’s
arms. Then as reality came into focus, I added
my favorite word of the moment, “Phenomenal.”
Mattie smiled with relief as if she’d
feared I might suddenly say that she was awful
and she should never show her face on a stage
again. She kissed the air beside my ear as her
cheek brushed against mine. “Come help me out of
this straightjacket.”
Just like that I was once again Mattie’s
little helper. I followed her back to the
dressing room where the other women were already
stripping out of their long dresses and holding
the hair off the backs of their necks, standing
in front of a large revolving fan. “Jesus, it’s
hot out there,” one of them said.
We weaved through the women to Mattie’s
dressing table in the back. Lightbulbs shone
from the sides and top of the mirror, and Mattie
sat down to wipe off her pancake make up with a
tissue smeared with cold cream. I helped her
take off the blond cascading wig and then placed
it on the Styrofoam head with its crayoned blue
eyes.
The women’s voices in the dressing room
climbed over each other in that after-show mix
of hilarity, exhaustion and yearning for it not
to end quite yet. The thing they felt was almost
palpable. And I knew they’d all head somewhere
to unwind. Usually, the unwinding happened at
our house where Miz Johnny would have left
plates full of little sandwiches and the bar
would be stocked, the Steinway tuned, its ivory
keys waiting for Carl to sit down and dance his
fingers over them.
“You know I could never play Mimi in New
York at my age,” Mattie said to no one in
particular, “and yet I don’t think I’ve ever
done her better.”
“It just goes to show you,” Fallene
called from her vanity nearby. “Age gives us the
experience to bring depth to a role.”
“You’re right,” Mattie said, wiping the
tissue across her eyelids. “But I don’t need to
grow another second older, thank you.”
Fallene laughed. When they were together,
they obsessed about their ages. Mattie swore
she’d go home and jump off the London Bridge if
she had to grow old and feeble with her hips
breaking and her skin sagging to the ground the
way her grandmother had. Mattie had left England
at the age of nineteen, but it was still “home”
to her and she made a point of keeping her
fancy-sounding accent intact.
Louise came trundling over. She and her
husband Max, a postman, were in all of Mattie’s
operas. Louise usually played some minor role,
and Max, an enormously fat man, always played
the lead tenor in spite of his bulk because he
had as good a voice as you could find on the
entire continent, Mattie always said,
perpetually astounded that Max was just a
postman in Augusta, Georgia. Who would have
dreamed?
“Are we heading to your place,
Mathilda?”
Louise asked.
“Of course,” Mattie said.
She clumsily tried to unzip herself. I
took the zipper from her fingers and tugged it
down.
“Thank you, precious,” she said. She
pulled the dress from her shoulders. I turned
away to go buy a bottle of coke from the machine
in the hallway with the nickel in my pocket.
Even then a drink for a nickel was a novelty.
But as I was turning, Mattie bent forward
sharply and gasped.
“Mattie?”
I asked, wheeling back toward her. “Are you all
right?”
Our eyes met in the mirror. Sweat beaded
against her hairline. Her gray eyes looked
startled.
“What is it?” I asked.
She held onto the chair in front of her
and grimaced.
“I just had the worst pain.”
“Is it gas?” Fallene asked.
Mattie straightened up slowly and let the
dress fall to the floor.
“Look how fat I am,” she muttered. “I
couldn’t even put on a girdle earlier.”
Fallene stood up. We both stared at the
bulge in Mattie’s abdomen beneath her white
nylon slip.
“You need to see a doctor,” Fallene said.
Mattie went to the doctor on Monday while
I was at school. Usually, I would bike over to
the park after school with Gretchen and we would
go to our favorite hideout—a bridge over the
canal that we could hide under and try French
inhaling Winston cigarettes stolen from
Gretchen’s mother. Later we would go to the
corner store to buy a grape Nehi and some bubble
gum. We’d run the younger kids off the jungle
gym so we could climb on top of the bars and
watch the boys doing whatever stupid things they
had thought of doing that day.
But on that Monday I went straight home
to the two-story brick house with dormer windows
and a large porch. The lawn was wild and weedy
because Mattie didn’t care about such things.
She said what happened inside a house was more
important than how it looked outside. The screen
door needed painting. One of the shutters on the
living room window hung by one hinge. Miz Johnny
did all she could to keep the spider webs off
the porch, but otherwise the exterior of our
house was left to its own devices.
I leapt up the steps and went inside. I’d
been worried all day. During lunch I had gone
off to the restroom by myself. As I sat in the
stall taking a small moment of privacy, I heard
a voice inside my head. A voice in your head
should be an angel’s voice telling you that
everything is going to be fine, but this voice
was not angelic. It said simply, “Curtain call.”
Mattie sat in the sun room with a cup of
tea, reading the newspaper when I walked in. She
looked up at me. Her pale eyebrows rose and
fell. She seemed to be mustering up a comforting
lie, but then she didn’t have the heart to tell
it. Instead she let her eyes fall; her shoulders
hunched forward as if she were hiding something.
I pulled a wicker chair up next to her, took her
hand, and nestled my face against her shoulder.
We stayed like that until Miz Johnny
called us for dinner.
Spring came. The azaleas had a brawl of color in
our yard. The dogwood turned snowy white, and
forsythia wands of gold waved their spells.
While the earth obliviously burst forth in a
fountain of color, the news in the papers was
mostly bad: Anti-war protesters blew themselves
to pieces in New York City. Four college
students were killed in Ohio by National
Guardsmen. The Beatles broke up. Each of these
events occasioned a call from my father, who
wanted to know if I was aware of what was going
on. He was weirdly concerned about my education
in that way. But how could I care about these
things when my world was disintegrating?
We never said a word about Mattie’s sickness,
which turned out to be ovarian cancer, or how
long she had to live, which turned out to be not
much. I kept going to school, and Mattie planned
next year’s opera season as if she expected to
be around for it while Miz Johnny cleaned and
cooked and tried her damndest not to show undue
tenderness to Mattie.