Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [171]
She had slowly been building “Parker’s Back,” layer by layer, over several years. Her first glimmer of the story came when she ordered George Burchett’s Memoirs of a Tattooist from the Marboro bookstore list, which delighted her with its photograph of the old tattooist’s wife covered in tattoos, “like fabric.” Since at least 1960, she had been composing her story of O. E. Parker, a tattoo-covered young man and his disapproving wife, Sarah Ruth, daughter of a “Straight Gospel preacher.” In her unfinished third novel, she briefly found a spot for a man whose body was covered in tattoos — Mr. Gunnels, the farm help, with the face of God tattooed upon his back. When Walter tries to take a picture of the haunting image, his hand trembles and the photo comes out blurry.
Often more intimate in letters than in person, Flannery, during her grave illness, shared some of her most vulnerable feelings with Cudden Ward Dorrance, whom she had met once, and Janet McKane, a schoolteacher from Manhattan, whom she had never met but who had written her a letter that touched off a flurry of responses, beginning in January 1963, often including childhood memories from Savannah, or her brief time in Manhattan. On April 2, McKane organized a high mass to be said for Flannery’s recovery at a Byzantine rite church in Manhattan. “I read my Mass prayers this morning,” Flannery wrote her on the day, “not Byzantine by any means but with much appreciation of what you were doing for me.” So tucked into her story was a signal to McKane, like so many to Maryat, because she chose as the image for Parker’s back a tattooed Byzantine Christ, done in “little blocks.”
Flannery’s hospital stay was marked by four blood transfusions and an endless series of tests. Her weight was down about twenty pounds. As days turned into weeks and finally, to her near disbelief, “one month,” the only new prescription by the doctors was a low-protein diet, since her kidneys were unable to refine toxins out of meat, eggs, and cheese. “I’m for medicare; otherwise I got few convictions and almost no blood,” she wrote the Cheneys, as her lupus, and so her hospital bill, was not covered by insurance; she and her family had been paying most of the medicine and hospital bills. But a hint of resignation crept into her tone, amid all the comedy, when Dr. Merrill decided that she would not be helped by further hospitalization. “Dr. Fulghum is back in the driver’s seat,” she ominously informed Maryat, “& Dr. M. has checked out.” When the volunteer ladies in pink smocks brought three letters from Janet McKane, she closed her reply with a heartbreaking couplet from Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving? —.
On Saturday, June 21, Flannery was once again home at Andalusia, where Regina set up a table and electric typewriter by her bedside. “I can get out & get at it,” she wrote Cudden Ward Dorrance, “work an hour & rest an hour, etc. That’s all I ask.” Within these hour-long reprieves, she secured the last pieces of her book. “I look like a bull frog but I can work,” she guaranteed Tom Stritch, thanking him for her favorite music of the month, liking “the 4-hand piano Chopin thing best; there is a point in it where the peafowls join in.” Feeling tentatively emboldened, she arranged to push back the book’s publication date until spring 1965, so that she could do some rewriting on “The Enduring Chill,” decide whether to include “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead,” let “Judgment Day” sit “a few weeks longer,” finish “Parker’s Back.” She counted nine or ten options for inclusion in the book.
The stories Flannery finished in this hospital-like setting shared with “Revelation” both maturity of tone and ambitious scope. In the midst of “Judgment Day,” old Tanner remembers