Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [19]
The flaring of this mysterious disease, with no known cause, ten times more likely to occur in women than men, combined with a downward business spiral to create a life crisis. Due to declining health, Edward O’Connor resigned midterm from his position as state commander. Traits that had been thought of as laziness — such as coming home to take afternoon naps — were now understood as symptoms of the illness. Toward the end of a difficult year, O’Connor began a letter-writing campaign to lobby for a job in President Roosevelt’s newly created Federal Housing Administration. On December 23, 1937, he wrote to Erwin Sibley, a well-connected attorney friend of the Cline family, “Tried to get in touch with you while in Milledgeville the other day, but was unable to catch you. Wanted to ask a favor of you.” He hoped Sibley would plead his case with the two Georgia senators and with Congressman Carl Vinson, representative from the Sixth District of Georgia and chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee.
“WHEN I WAS twelve I made up my mind absolutely that I would not get any older,” O’Connor wrote in 1956 to her friend Betty Hester, who had pointed out a childlike quality in her. “I don’t remember how I meant to stop it. There was something about ‘teen’ attached to anything that was repulsive to me. I certainly didn’t approve of what I saw of people that age. I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve, or anyway, less burdened. The weight of centuries lies on children, I’m sure of it.”
Some of that burden, “the weight of centuries,” was her father’s illness, and the forces set in motion by his troubles amounted to the abrupt end of her childhood. In the spring of 1937, she was still the little girl who arrived at school in “the electric,” and was taken occasionally by Mrs. Semmes for swimming lessons in the pool of the De Soto, Savannah’s fanciest hotel. During the summer, she wore a yellow-and-white-striped seersucker sundress with shoulder straps tied together in a simple bow, hand-sewn by her mother. She donned, as well, the unlikely green serge dress and jacket uniform of the Girl Scouts; disliking troop hikes, she rarely attended meetings, even though they were held just across Lafayette Square in the carriage house of the pink Italianate villa where Juliette Gordon Low founded the national organization as the Girl Guides in 1912.
Between the lines of this life as usual, though, the watchful girl with keen eavesdropping abilities would have sensed something amiss, as news of her father’s sickness remained hushed and secret. “She never knew her father had lupus,” said her childhood friend Newell Turner Parr. “She never had any idea. In those days, they didn’t tell children those things. You might be told Grandmother’s deaf or Mrs. So and So can’t see very well, be nice to her, don’t knock her down, but diseases and death and things like that, children weren’t told.” In her early, autobiographical story about Mary Flemming, the father is likewise only half seen, imminent, as the mother, slicing tomatoes at the sink, orders “MF,” as she calls her, to the bathroom to wash her hands after “fooling with those chickens” in the backyard: “‘Your father will be here any minute,’ her mother said, ‘and the table won’t be set. Hold your stomach in.’”
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