Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [90]
Due to her convalescence, they chose to set up quarters on the main floor, leaving for guests two upstairs bedrooms, reached by a steep, railed, central staircase, its landing brightly lit by a long window. Flannery claimed, as her bedroom-study, the front corner room on the west side of the south-facing house. She soon had in place a narrow bed with a high Victorian headboard pushed against one tall front window; a few steps away she positioned a writing desk smack onto the back of an armoire, turned away from two corner windows, her attention focused inward rather than on any pastoral views. Her mother’s bedroom was directly behind hers, connected by a doorway. Across the entrance hall was a plain, high-ceilinged, gray-walled combination parlor and dining room; to the rear, the kitchen, where they met for morning coffee — always efficiently prepared by Regina the night before and poured into a thermos — and listened to news on the radio.
Not having lived at home since college, Flannery now found herself faced with coping, as an adult, with her mother, in close quarters. Regina was both a godsend and a challenge for the daughter she persisted in calling “Mary Flannery.” Having matured from a comely Southern belle into a feisty, formidable widow, with a straight back, sharp nose, small chin, and enormous blue eyes, she countered Flannery’s near silence with endless garrulousness, and a zest for moneymaking. As overseer of the farm, she was a natural. According to one friend, “Regina was very petite, in charge. She was a very capable manager.” She was also an ideal nurse and caretaker, but, at times, as trying a companion for Flannery as she had been for Edward. “With me, Flannery tended to be a bit joking and sarcastic about her mother,” remembered Robie Macauley. “But the idea that Regina was a tyrant — though a beloved one — also came through.”
While their former plantation house on a rise of land was the main attraction of the twenty-one-acre central farm complex, its working plant had grown more productive since Uncle Bernard willed the operation to Louis and Regina. Outbuildings now included a low horse barn; a vast, two-story cow barn with hayloft; brick milk-processing shed; well house; pump house; and a white wooden water tower on tall spindly legs. The tenants’ house was an early-nineteenth-century, two-story plantation cottage, with an open porch, just two hundred feet from the main house. Three other workers’ shacks were located in low-lying fields farther out on the property. By the time the Union-Recorder ran a feature on Andalusia, in 1958, the dairy farm boasted eighty-five Holstein, Guernsey, and Jersey cows, grazing on fescue grass and crimson and white clover, and supplying milk to the Putnam County Cooperative: “the cows are fat and sleek and giving plenty of milk.”
As Regina busied herself with driving about the property in her stick-shift automobile, inspecting fencing, or planning a livestock pond at the bottom of the hill, her daughter stayed in her room, shades drawn, having reinstated an inviolable regimen of writing for several hours in the morning. Yet during her first season at Andalusia, most of this writing consisted of rewriting. Although she felt that her novel was essentially finished, the publication process was full of starts and stops, beginning with a long silent spell that made the first-time author nervous.