Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [170]
Yet every few weeks brought a new hardship. Toward the end of May, the unfortunate news was a medical decision that O’Connor would need to check back into Piedmont Hospital, the ultramodern, 250-bed redbrick hospital in the Buckhead section of Atlanta, where she had been given a series of bone tests in late 1960. Before leaving for the hospital, she signed a contract for her collection, with the title she had originally suggested: Everything That Rises Must Converge. As she wrote Maryat on May 21, referring to her Milledgeville Drs. Fulghum and Burrell, “Going to Piedmont tomorrow to let Arthur J. Merrill take over. F. & B. give up, more or less, for the present anyways.” She at least felt confident, with Dr. Merrill, that “he knows what he’s doing.”
Her eye for irony unimpaired, Piedmont Hospital provided much material; and as weak as she was, with visitors discouraged, a number of friends managed to get past Regina, who guarded the door by day and resided nearby with her sister Aunt Cleo at night. The hospital included a nursing school, and among Flannery’s favorite characters to pin to an imaginary wall were its student nurses. As she wrote in an account to Maryat, signed “Excelsior,” “Here the student nurses switch in with very starchy aprons and beehive hairdos and say such things as ‘What’s bugging you, huh?’” Flannery wrote to Betty, “By now, I know all the student nurses who ‘want to write,’ — if they are sloppy & inefficient & can’t make up the bed, that’s them — they want to write. ‘Inspirational stuff I’m good at,’ said one of them. ‘I just get so taken up with it I forget what I’m writing.’”
The first of her friends to show up was Abbot Augustine More, met by Regina, who warned him he could stay only three minutes, though he stayed thirty. One weekend, Caroline Gordon “breezed in . . . her hair the color of funnytoor polish.” Gordon later recalled, “After the nurse had left the room, Flannery pulled a notebook out from under her pillow, ‘The doctor says I musn’t do any work. But he says it’s all right for me to write a little fiction.’ She paused to grin at us.” Louise Abbot, having received a note from Flannery — “I am sick of being sick” — hurried to her “fourth or fifth floor” hospital room, its bank of windows overlooking the tops of green trees. “Guess who’s here?” Regina sang, as she ushered in Louise. “Flannery has just waked up, and she pushes herself up on one elbow and smiles,” remembered Abbot. “The afternoon sunlight in the room and the dark blue of her pajamas make her eyes bluer than I have ever seen them.”
The child psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles, author of Flannery O’Connor’s South, met O’Connor only once, at her bedside at Piedmont. Involved with issues of race relations in the South, he and his wife had become acquainted with Ruth Anne Jackson, a six-foot, 250-pound, African American woman who worked as a nurse’s aide at Piedmont. She told them of “Mizz O’Connor,” her patient, a writer “who believed in God,” who she wanted them to meet. “I met a woman who was dying,” says Coles, knowing nothing then of her reputation. “Her face was inflamed as a consequence of steroid treatment.” Flannery was “tickled” to discover that Coles was from Concord and preferred Emerson to Thoreau. “You will find here in rural Georgia fallen angels by the thousands,” his wife remembered her telling them, with the thinnest of smiles.
Complaining of a bed table “too high so you can’t write on it without breaking your arm,” Flannery did manage to accomplish impressive work from her hospital bed. She had actually finished the bulk of her rewriting of “Judgment Day,” which she had briefly been calling “Going Home,” when she completed “Revelation.” In the hospital she mostly concentrated hard, within her flickering imagination, to make out the curious images and plot of her next story, “Parker’s Back.” She wrote to Catharine Carver on June 17, warning her that when she returned