Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [86]
She humorously complained to the Fitzgeralds, in December, of heaviness in her “typing arms.” She had retyped her entire novel to set up Haze’s self-blinding, and blamed the ache on her labors, because she could no longer raise her arms to the typewriter. Flannery insisted, in later years, that hers had not been a particularly sickly childhood. “I am wondering where you got the idea that my childhood was full of ‘endless illnesses,’” she corrected Betty Hester. “Besides the usual measles, chickenpox and mumps, I was never sick.” Yet even before the Dietl’s crisis, she noticed problems while living at Yaddo, and in Manhattan, as she “ran from one end of it to the other looking for an honest doctor.” When the condition in her arms worsened, she began to fear having a contagious disease that the children might catch. So, at Flannery’s request, Sally drove her to Wilton for an appointment with Dr. Leonard Maidman, the Fitzgerald family physician.
Dr. Maidman offered a provisional diagnosis of the joint pains as rheumatoid arthritis; he said the symptoms checked out, but not perfectly. Since she was soon traveling to Milledgeville, he recommended a complete physical examination at her local hospital. “She had disguised her symptoms,” explained Sally Fitzgerald, “and had not told us how severe they were.” When Sally saw her off for the Christmas holidays, she noticed some stiffness in gait as Flannery walked away from her along the boarding platform. But otherwise she seemed fine, “smiling perhaps a little wanly but wearing her beret at a jaunty angle,” promising to be back in January. On the overnight train trip south, though, she became desperately ill, and by the time of her arrival, Uncle Louis, who had not seen her in nine months, said his niece resembled “a shriveled old woman.” The Fitzgeralds were in “a state of complete shock” when Mrs. O’Connor telephoned, a few nights later, to break the startling news that Flannery, at twenty-five, was dying of lupus.
Part Two
Chapter Six
The Life You Save
Her pivotal train ride from New York City back to Georgia, at Christmastime 1950, was a strong enough plot point in O’Connor’s life to show up nearly intact in her fiction. She once insisted that “any story I reveal myself in completely will be a bad story.” Yet when she wrote “The Enduring Chill,” seven years after the event, her depiction of a homecoming was barely camouflaged. The playwright Asbury Fox, returning, ill, from New York City, is a young man, but he is also twenty-five, and the detail of putting three thicknesses of the New York Times between his blankets to stay warm in his apartment, during winter, reminded Robert Fitzgerald of conditions in Connecticut: “I know for a fact that she had to stuff newspaper in the window cracks; we did, too.”
Although Asbury’s train, in the fictional rendering, is met by his widowed mother, the shock described is familiar from the recounting by Uncle Louis of Flannery’s disembarking. As soon as Mrs. Fox catches a first glimpse of her son, bracing himself behind the conductor, with a bloodshot left eye, “puffy and pale,” she gasps: “The smile vanished so suddenly, the shocked look that replaced it was so complete, that he realized for the first time that he must look as ill as he was.” Through the medium of this snotty young artist, O’Connor allows a glimpse of some of her own fears while experiencing her reversal of fortune: “The train glided silently away behind him, leaving a view of the twin blocks of dilapidated stores. He gazed after the