Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [160]
A subtle shift in her fictional world was taking place, too, in the depictions of the ever-present mother figure. While matricide continued as a favorite climax, a softer approach was subtly introduced. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” the fatal clobbering of Julian’s mother is followed by his mournful keening as he discovers “the world of guilt and sorrow.” While Norton’s mother is deceased, her presence in “The Lame Shall Enter First” is benign. “The little boy wouldn’t have been looking for his mother if she hadn’t been a good one when she was alive,” Flannery told Betty. Certainly acceptance of her own mother was a condition to which Flannery aspired, as she gradually shifted, during the 1960s, from using “I” to “we,” when speaking of matters at home. As Maryat wrote, over a decade later, in one of her journals, “I’m convinced that she used Regina in some way as part of her worship. Regina was her cross. She was Regina’s cross. It worked. They both basked now and then in the glow of it.”
Yet crossbearing was an arduous daily discipline, and much tension remained. Having once accused her of getting “away with murder” for the shocking “likeness” to Regina in the gored Mrs. May of “Greenleaf” (“She don’t read any of it,” assured Flannery), Maryat did witness some difficult moments. She was quite startled one afternoon when Regina barged into Flannery’s room, stormed over, and “smacked the windows open” to scream at Shot for some infraction. After she left, slamming the door behind her, Maryat said, “Surely she doesn’t do that in the mornings!” Flannery nodded vigorously. “She does do it.” Admittedly a girl at the time, Catherine Morai, a parishioner at Sacred Heart Church, felt that she routinely observed friction between them at early mass: “I have a very strong memory of Flannery struggling down the church steps with her crutches and her braces. The look on her mother’s face was angry and annoyed.”
Throughout the summer of 1961, Regina’s all-consuming business project was the transformation of Andalusia from a dairy farm to a beef farm, while also expanding its timber sales. Some of the attraction of the new venture was having a business that would not require as many workers to operate the milk barn. “The staff is non compos mentis every weekend,” Flannery wrote the Gossetts, “and she HAS HAD ENOUGH.” By July, they had sold their dairy herd, bought a purebred shorthorn bull, and were now fully in the beef business. Bulls were enough of a presence by the fall that when talk turned to building a bomb shelter, Flannery claimed to dream nightly of “radiated bulls and peacocks and swans.” Of the constant activity in a stretch of timberland, the critic Richard Gilman recalled, during his visit, “I could hear the dull whine of distant buzz-saws.”
Flannery’s own project was researching a hip operation that she hoped would allow her to walk freely again, without crutches. The Lourdes miracle, as humble as it was, had been short-lived, and she was seeking a more reliable improvement. Her closest confidante in these medical matters had become Maryat, and Flannery was surprisingly receptive as her friend began to explore experimental avenues of treatment; she was conferring especially with Dr. Henry Sprung, a lupus specialist in Providence, Rhode Island. In April, Flannery reported to Maryat that she had visited Dr. Merrill’s office in Atlanta for injections of cortisone and Novocain in both hips to ease her sitting and standing; full relief lasted only about two weeks. In July, she shared her frustration that “Scientist Merrill” had nixed a surgical-steel hip-implant operation, approved by her bone doctor, because he was afraid of reactivating her lupus with a kidney flare or an infection.
Flannery was experiencing