Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [100]
Flannery cleverly recruited a neighbor, Elsie Hill, described by Sally as a “strong-minded Lucy Stoner,” because of her early feminist leanings and strong leadership style, to watch over the situation until Robert Fitzgerald returned. She then brought Loretta along with her on the train to New York City, plying her with candy and a dollar bribe for remaining quiet, until handing her over at the gate to her mother. As she reported on the exchange to Sally Fitzgerald, “She was a very nice-looking pleasant woman and said that she had been very worried that Loretta might have misbehaved. I assured her this wasn’t the case. A noble lie, I thought.” Though her reunion with the Fitzgeralds had been the epitome of a cherished plan run amok, she was sincere when she added her thanks to Robert: “It was a great boon to me to be able to spend a month in Connecticut.”
From New York City, Flannery flew to Atlanta, where Regina had arranged an immediate appointment with Dr. Merrill, whose offices were located in an old home downtown at 35 Fourth Street, with a lab and X-ray machine on the second floor. The doctor concluded that the lupus had been reactivated by the viral infection, accompanied by an onset of high fevers; he ordered two blood transfusions, and raised her ACTH dosage from 0.25 cc to 1 cc a day. Yet she was able to find good news in the cost of the medicine, not covered by insurance, which she described as “a kind of Guggenheim. The ACTH has been reduced from 19.50 to 7.50.” She felt palpable relief, too, at having the nature of the disease finally out in the open. As she wrote Robert Fitzgerald, in Indiana, “I know now that it is lupus and am very glad to so know.” She even broached the matter with Regina, without implicating Sally as her informant — her mother taking personal pride in informing her that Dr. Merrill had diagnosed lupus before even seeing her, “over the phone.”
Again forced back home by disease — an unmistakable echo of her return eighteen months earlier — Flannery clearly appraised the meaning of her difficult situation. She did not know whether she would be allotted the same three years of borrowed time as her father, following his diagnosis, or if indeed “the Scientist” possessed a miracle cure. She had her doubts. As Mr. Shiftlet speechifies in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”: “There’s one of these doctors in Atlanta that’s taken a knife and cut the human heart . . . and held it in his hand . . . and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and lady . . . he don’t know more about it than you or me.” Yet she was certain that Connecticut was no longer to be her home, and so asked Sally Fitzgerald to please mail back her things: two suitcases, coat, camera, a copy of Art and Scholasticism, and her Bible.
If her old life could fit into a couple of trunks, shipped, as old man Tanner’s body would be transported in a rickety casket from up north in her story “Judgment Day,” Flannery was simultaneously looking forward to another crate arriving by rail from the opposite direction: Eustis, Florida. This crate was charged with a contrary significance, as a beginning rather than a closure. After spending six weeks in bed, following her “flare,” but avoiding Emory Hospital — “a gret place to avoid” — Flannery had been reading through the Florida Market Bulletin, when she came across a listing for three-year-old “peafowl,” at sixty-five dollars a pair. Never having seen or heard a peacock, she unhesitatingly circled the ad, seized, as if by instinct, and passed it to her mother. “I’m going to order me those,” she said. “Don’t those things eat flowers?” Regina asked. “They’ll eat Startena like the rest of them,” Flannery answered with fake certitude.
On a mild day in October, the shipment finally arrived via Railway Express. Driving up to the station, Regina and Flannery saw that the wooden crate had already been unloaded onto the platform. As O’Connor