Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [139]
A reprieve came in February, when Dr. Merrill advised canceling the trip because her X ray revealed hip deterioration that he now admitted was probably a side effect of the lupus. He suggested possible treatment at Warm Springs. Flannery received the news with secret relief — but not Cousin Katie, who then offered to fund a less taxing trip that would include Lourdes, but not all the other stops. Flannery was hardly eager to take in what she kept calling “Baloney Castle” — the Blarney Castle, in Killarney. But she had hoped to see the Fitzgerald family. So when Sally offered to put the O’Connors up at their home in Italy and accompany them to rejoin the other pilgrims in Paris, Flannery agreed. “Left for two minutes alone in foreign parts,” she joked to Sally, “Regina and I would probably end up behind the Iron Curtain asking the way to Lourdes in sign language.”
Yet for all her satire, Flannery was not entirely opposed to the trip. In the face of skeptics, this unlikely “church lady” could be far less sarcastic about it. Flannery was sincere about the upcoming pilgrimage with Katherine Anne Porter, who briefly converted to Catholicism in her youth, during a brush with tuberculosis. She told Betty that when Porter asked, during her March visit, “where we were going in Europe and I said Lourdes, a very strange expression came over her face, just a slight shock as if some sensitive spot had been touched. She said that she had always wanted to go to Lourdes.” She conceded to the Fitzgeralds that “my cousin is certainly very good to give us this trip.” While claiming to prefer to visit the Matisse Chapel, in Vence, just completed in 1951, a journey to the heart of a nearly medieval spirituality was hardly unthinkable.
Three days before departing she responsibly filed her “Last Will and Testament of Mary Flannery O’Connor,” at the Baldwin County Court House, reflecting a sense at the time of European travel as a major undertaking, and belying her focus, perhaps even more than usual, on her certain mortality. “Item-One” of the will directed her executrix, Regina O’Connor, to “set aside the sum of $100.00 for the purpose to have masses said for the repose of my soul.” Robert Fitzgerald, named literary executor, was assigned care for all unpublished manuscripts and the letters that had been preserved by her in carbon copies. Her books and paintings were to be consigned to the GSCW library. After the filing of the will, the remainder of preparation over the weekend consisted of packing, with much extra fussing by Regina. Flannery relayed one exchange to Betty: “She is reading the Lourds book and every now and then announces a fact, such as, ‘It doesn’t make any difference how much you beg and plead, they won’t let you in.’ ‘Won’t let you in where?’ ‘In Lourds with a short sleeved dress on or low cut.’ ‘I ain’t got any low cut dress.’”
On Monday, April 21, Flannery and her mother, “like Mr. Head and Nelson facing Atlanta,” she joked to Maryat, boarded a plane bound for Idlewild Airport in New York City. Unlike the other fourteen pilgrims, who took a bus to the Manger-Vanderbilt Hotel, at Park Avenue and 34th Street, Flannery and her mother were met by a limousine dispatched by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, to transport her to a meeting with Mr. Straus and Miss Cudahy. Giroux’s advice on an escape clause had proved to be prescient, as both Carver and Lindley did depart Harcourt, and Flannery and her agent decided that her novel should be with Mr. Giroux. “I am properly back where I started from,” she said, with delight. The publisher Roger Straus telegrammed ahead to colleagues in Paris and Rome, informing them of the arrival of “our new important American author.”
On the evening of April 22, O