Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [31]
The burial service took place on Monday, February 3, a gray, wintry day, at Sacred Heart Church on Milledgeville’s North Jefferson Street. This simple sanctuary, topped by a steeple and cross, had been the scene of all of the important Cline and Treanor rites of passage for nearly three-quarters of a century. Built with bricks and Gothic-arched, hand-pressed, clear-glass windows from the handsome Lafayette Hotel that once stood on the site, the church was constructed mostly with help from Flannery O’Connor’s great-grandparents. Its first wedding was held on February 8, 1875, when her grandfather Peter J. Cline married Katie Treanor. Its first funeral was that of Mary Treanor, daughter of Hugh and Johannah Harty Treanor. Edward and Regina had been married there just nineteen years earlier by Father Morrow. The current church organist was Aunt Gertie Treanor.
The chapel was an intimate, confined space, like a small country church. To the left, behind the altar rail, was a baptismal font; to the right, a freestanding pulpit. The Reverend James E. King conducted a traditional requiem mass, in Latin, facing the main altar, looking up toward a hanging, nearly life-sized, loin-draped Christ on the cross. An honorary escort for the casket, resting in the center aisle, was made up of local and state officers of the American Legion. Among the pallbearers was Dr. C. B. Fulghum, the Cline family doctor. Edward O’Connor was interred in a Cline and Treanor family plot on the northern edge of City Cemetery, and a special Rosary was said for the repose of his soul in the front parlor of the Cline Mansion. “I went to the funeral as I was a Peabody class officer,” recalls Elizabeth Shreve Ryan. “It was a very cold day, and it was a very sad, dreary occasion. I don’t think any of the rest of us had ever lost a father.” Mary Flannery consoled her mother by reminding her that he was now better off than they were.
O’Connor rarely spoke of her father again. Yet not speaking of him did not imply that she did not feel his loss deeply. She would often keep a discreet silence about subjects that mattered to her the most, beginning with her relationship with her father. Her very silence was a stolid marker of its depth. “I think she did have a wholehearted love for her father,” says Louise Abbot, a close friend of O’Connor’s, beginning in the midfifties. “The love was of a kind we most often think of children having for their mother.” In talking about her personal feelings about God in her religious life, O’Connor, tellingly, once wrote Betty Hester, “I’ve never spent much time over the bride-bridegroom analogy. For me, perhaps because it began for me in the beginning, it’s been more father and child.” While many have noticed the dominant place of widows in her fiction, every widow, or orphan, implies a missing husband or father. O’Connor’s two novels, and many of her stories, are filled with the eraser marks of all these dead fathers.
In a jumbled notebook that O’Connor kept during her first year of college, about two years after the death of her father, she did meditate briefly on her grief. A spiritually precocious seventeen-year-old, she gave a rare glimpse into the private wisdom she earned from the tragedy:
The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder. Our plans were so beautifully laid out, ready to be carried to action, but with magnificent certainty God laid them aside and said, “You have forgotten — mine?”
Soon after their return to Milledgeville in the fall of 1940, Regina O’Connor got in touch with George Haslam, the adviser to the high school newspaper, the Peabody Palladium. She knew that her daughter was too shy to make such a move herself. Yet she also knew