Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [15]
Mrs. O’Connor oversaw with watchful vigilance the childhood of this special daughter, who was filled with such deeply felt stirrings, as well as some weird imaginings. Her third cousin Patricia Persse judged her “a very peculiar child.” In her own entertaining, Regina liked to be sophisticated and au courant. One of her favorite party dresses, stylish among American ladies in the 1920s, was a lavender crepe silk kimono, hemmed in lace, with long, flowing sleeves, and an Empire fitted waist clasped with a small bouquet of silk flowers in pale pink, ecru, and coral. Yet for her daughter, the mother invited into their home only those well-behaved playmates eager to participate in games and activities involving fantasy and imagination. The rumor in the neighborhood was that Mrs. O’Connor kept a list of approved playmates, and at least once turned a child away.
One of the happier events promoted weekly by the mother was a Saturday morning gathering around the radio in the parlor to listen to Let’s Pretend, a CBS radio series for children that began broadcasting in March 1934. Opening with a jaunty musical theme, the popular show used a cast of child actors, often eight or nine years old, to render, live, such classics as “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the Beast,” or “Rumpelstiltskin.” The announcer would roar at the outset, “Heellooo, Pretenders!” Having listened with his brother and sister to the same program in another part of the country, the Brooklyn-born children’s author Maurice Sendak could still summon for an interviewer some of its dialogue and mood seventy years later: “‘How do we get to Pretend Land?’ And a little boy would say, ‘Let’s go on a boat!’ We’d stare at the radio.”
At the end of the thirty-minute broadcast, Mrs. O’Connor served snacks of hot chocolate with homemade gingerbread or brownies to the kids, including Lillian and Ann Dowling, Cousin Margaret Persse, and Newell Turner, the daughter of an osteopath, who lived across the street on “the tall floors” of Hamilton House, built in the 1870s in the decorative style of a Second Empire château. “Mrs. O’Connor was very friendly and sweet and nice,” remembers Newell Turner Parr. “And very particular. She had very definite ideas about things. I remember Mr. O’Connor more vaguely because he was not at home, he was at work. Fathers were usually not quite as available.” Taking her cue from one of the Let’s Pretend broadcasts of 1934, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Parr has said of her friend Mary Flannery, “She was really genuine . . . to adults, she would say what she thought, which wasn’t always acceptable. I am sure that if she had been around, she would have been the first to tell the emperor that he didn’t have any clothes on.”
Many of the same playmates were enrolled in a short-lived club Mary Flannery formed about the same time the radio program first aired. She dubbed her group the “Merriweather Girls,” after a series of adventure books, and nominated herself president. Its members, fancying themselves Bet, Shirley, Joy, and Kit of Merriweather Manor, met in a gazebo-like wooden playhouse, a gift of Katie Semmes. The playhouse was fitted into a corner of the backyard, otherwise teeming with Rhode Island red, Plymouth Rock, and white leghorn chickens. During several afternoons, these girls sat about a round table, straddling quaint, triangular seats constructed by an uncle, and listened as President O’Connor read to them her latest stories. “She had pages and pages of handwritten stories,” Merriweather Girl Parr has admitted, “but I wasn’t quite smart enough to listen attentively.” Written in pencil on lined notebook paper, with her own