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By Root 1417 0

developed into a showpiece with the slow accretion of architectural details: a pitched Victorian red metal roof, a wraparound front porch, a widow’s walk, a lace-brick wall, built by slaves, and an antique lamppost, imported from Savannah. Each spring, as the azaleas, dogwoods, and redbuds bloomed along the town’s elm-lined streets, the Cline Mansion ranked as an attraction for garden club tours and, beginning in the spring of 1939, the annual State Garden Club “pilgrimage of old homes.” O’Connor watched, as a young girl, while her neighbors “trouped through in respectful solemnity.” She signed the guest book with her own name and the names of all of her chickens and listed their joint address as “Hungry.”

The impresario of the Cline Mansion was Aunt Mary Cline, her mother’s oldest sister, then in her midfifties. A tall, thin woman, her salt-and-pepper hair tied back, with an elegant, patrician air and regal posture, “Sister,” as O’Connor called her, was the family’s ersatz matriarch. O’Connor’s college friend Betty Boyd assumed the nickname was a private joke on Aunt Mary’s appearance: “an austere nun . . . always in white.” Yet Regina O’Connor corrected this impression in a note she penned in the top margin of a memoir Boyd showed her years later: “Sister was the first girl to arrive in the family after five boys and everybody in the family called her Sister.” Indeed Mary Cline was the only girl in Peter Cline’s first family of seven children. When her father died, as had the two Mrs. Clines, she declined Katie Semmes’s invitation to move to Savannah; she chose instead to take on the responsibility of matron for home and family.

Extending hospitality to the O’Connor family during a time of trouble was a natural response for Aunt Mary. According to O’Connor’s first cousin Dr. Peter Cline, “Sister would always add another room on when somebody got sick.” The other residents in the home at the time were all unmarried women. A blunt, formidable companion was her sister Katie, working as a mail order clerk in the post office. Nicknamed “Duchess” by her clever niece, Aunt Katie — often dressed in a long coat with a big fur collar — was recalled by Betty Boyd Love as bearing “a strong resemblance to the illustrator John Tenniel’s Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. She was a woman of vigorous appearance, vigorous language, and vigorous opinion.” A satiric portrait of both aunts, Mary and Katie, worthy of “My Relitives,” shows up in Aunts Bessie and Mattie of “The Partridge Festival”: “The two of them were on the front porch, one sitting, the other standing. . . . They were box-jawed old ladies who looked like George Washington with his wooden teeth in. They wore black suits with large ruffled jabots and had dead-white hair pulled back.” On the top floor of the Cline Mansion lived a third relative, the more diminutive Great-aunt Gertie Treanor, white-haired, less than five feet tall, who devoted hours to stitching muslin covers for St. Christopher medals on her little sewing machine.

The interior of the Cline Mansion was as grand, and full of character lines, as its façade. Passing in the entrance hall under a cut-glass chandelier, guests to the home, or on a garden club tour, would walk into either a drawing room to the left, or a parlor to the right, where the Clines gathered in the evenings to recite the Rosary. Dominating the drawing room was a rosewood concert grand piano; on the Colonial mantel, silver candelabra were set on either side of a large, painted portrait of Katie Semmes as a three-year-old girl in a pretty blue dress. The parlor room, lit by a pair of crystal hurricane lamps, was a flickering vision of desks, chairs, and highly polished end tables, with a long portrait of a handsome cousin, John MacMahon. Following a visit to the virtually unchanged mansion in the midsixties, the scholar Josephine Hendin recorded her impression of many family pictures, hanging on walls and propped on tables, of “Infants, girls with sausage curls, and impressively mustachioed men.”

A step down, behind the parlor, was a dark wood