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.Each spring, as the azaleas, dogwoods, and redbuds bloomed along the town’s elm-lined streets, the Cline Mansion ranked as an attraction for garden club tours and, beginning in the spring of 1939, the annual State Garden Club “pilgrimage of old homes.” O’Connor watched, as a young girl, while her neighbors “trouped through in respectful solemnity.” She signed the guest book with her own name and the names of all of her chickens and listed their joint address as “Hungry.”The impresario of the Cline Mansion was Aunt Mary Cline, her mother’s oldest sister, then in her midfifties.A tall, thin woman, her salt-and-pepper hair tied back, with an elegant, patrician air and regal posture, “Sister,” as O’Connor called her, was the family’s ersatz matriarch.O’Connor’s college friend Betty Boyd assumed the nickname was a private joke on Aunt Mary’s appearance: “an austere nun.always in white.” Yet Regina O’Connor corrected this impression in a note she penned in the top margin of a memoir Boyd showed her years later: “Sister was the first girl to arrive in the family after five boys and everybody in the family called her Sister.” Indeed Mary Cline was the only girl in Peter Cline’s first family of seven children.When her father died, as had the two Mrs.Clines, she declined Katie Semmes’s invitation to move to Savannah; she chose instead to take on the responsibility of matron for home and family.Extending hospitality to the O’Connor family during a time of trouble was a natural response for Aunt Mary.According to O’Connor’s first cousin Dr.Peter Cline, “Sister would always add another room on when somebody got sick.” The other residents in the home at the time were all unmarried women.A blunt, formidable companion was her sister Katie, working as a mail order clerk in the post office.Nicknamed “Duchess” by her clever niece, Aunt Katie — often dressed in a long coat with a big fur collar — was recalled by Betty Boyd Love as bearing “a strong resemblance to the illustrator John Tenniel’s Duchess in Alice in Wonderland.She was a woman of vigorous appearance, vigorous language, and vigorous opinion.” A satiric portrait of both aunts, Mary and Katie, worthy of “My Relitives,” shows up in Aunts Bessie and Mattie of “The Partridge Festival”: “The two of them were on the front porch, one sitting, the other standing.They were box-jawed old ladies who looked like George Washington with his wooden teeth in.They wore black suits with large ruffled jabots and had dead-white hair pulled back.” On the top floor of the Cline Mansion lived a third relative, the more diminutive Great-aunt Gertie Treanor, white-haired, less than five feet tall, who devoted hours to stitching muslin covers for St.Christopher medals on her little sewing machine.The interior of the Cline Mansion was as grand, and full of character lines, as its façade.Passing in the entrance hall under a cut-glass chandelier, guests to the home, or on a garden club tour, would walk into either a drawing room to the left, or a parlor to the right, where the Clines gathered in the evenings to recite the Rosary.Dominating the drawing room was a rosewood concert grand piano; on the Colonial mantel, silver candelabra were set on either side of a large, painted portrait of Katie Semmes as a three-year-old girl in a pretty blue dress.The parlor room, lit by a pair of crystal hurricane lamps, was a flickering vision of desks, chairs, and highly polished end tables, with a long portrait of a handsome cousin, John MacMahon.Following a visit to the virtually unchanged mansion in the midsixties, the scholar Josephine Hendin recorded her impression of many family pictures, hanging on walls and propped on tables, of “Infants, girls with sausage curls, and impressively mustachioed men.”A step down, behind the parlor, was a dark wood–paneled dining room, its mahogany banquet table set with family silver and porcelain, and lined by Jacobean chairs.Miss Mary presided here over groups of sixteen or eighteen for large midday dinners, with the children seated at two little tables under far bay windows.Everyone helped themselves to trays of biscuits, and platters of sweet potatoes and fried chicken, prepared and served by a staff of three or more black cooks and servants.“We’d have these big Sunday lunches,” remembers O’Connor’s first cousin Jack Tarleton.“Mary Cline would sit at the head of the table and tinkle that silver bell, and here would come this entourage of people from the kitchen serving everybody around this big table.She could play that role to the hilt.” Great-aunt Julia Cline was said by her son-in-law to have been “a speaking likeness” of the grandmother in O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Of a couple of reputed “alcoholic” uncles, Peter Cline says, “There were some oddballs in that family, too, but they kept them out of sight.”When Mary Flannery, still the only child living in a houseful of adults, left the main floor and climbed the central staircase that split forward and backward — called “good morning stairs” for the greetings exchanged on the middle landing — she found herself in a familiar world.While Sister and Duchess kept bedrooms on the first floor, and Aunt Gertie stayed in “the big room” on the east side of the cavernous second floor, her parents’ bedroom adjoined hers in a separate apartment on the west side.Here the teenage girl could shut the door and be alone in her long, narrow, high-ceilinged bedroom, once again overlooking a backyard — where she kept geese and her mother planted daffodils — as well as the formal boxwood gardens of the Old Governor’s Mansion.She spent countless hours on her stool at a high-legged clerk’s desk, drawing and writing.To further escape the bustle downstairs, she retreated to a vast attic room, full of trunks and chests (a garret much like the third floor in Savannah) and with a front gabled window that looked out over Greene Street to the cemetery beyond.The school where she was hastily enrolled was quite unlike either St.Vincent’s or Sacred Heart.First known as Peabody Model School when it was founded in 1891, Peabody Elementary was a lab school for practice teachers from the education department of Georgia State College for Women.Many of their supervising professors had studied at Teacher’s College at Columbia, testing ground for the liberal pedagogy of John Dewey, so the favored methods were eclectic and experimental.Mary Flannery’s classroom was on the second floor in the middle of a series of “Choo-Choo” buildings, connected by overhead walkways, on the main college campus.As of 1935, a new principal, Mildred English, an educator with a national reputation, made sure that all of her pupils were taught and graded not only in Reading, Social Studies, Science, and Arithmetic, but also in Arts, Health Activities, and Social Attitudes and Habits.Though she had been in class for only two months when the year ended, her instructor, Martha Phifer, filed a full report card, including a special note: “Mary Flannery needs to work on her spelling this summer.” Otherwise she was rated satisfactory in most areas: “Speaks distinctly with well-pitched voice”; “Contributes information to group”; “Enjoys singing with the group”; “Has good posture.” Responding to a survey, Mrs.O’Connor answered with snappy honesty about her daughter.To the question “Approximate time spent on home work?” she answered, “Very little.” To “Does he have any home responsibilities?” the answer was “No.” To “Does he prefer being alone rather than with others?”: “Occasionally enjoys others.” She listed as her daughter’s only physical defect “Error in vision [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]