Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [99]
A second unlikely guest, to whom Flannery claimed Maria was “allergic . . . on first sight,” was Mary Loretta Washington, a twelve-year-old African American “slum child” from New York City, charitably invited by Sally Fitzgerald for a country holiday through the Fresh Air Fund. Her two-week stay coincided with the second half of the visit of Flannery, who snitched in a letter to Robert Fitzgerald that Loretta “had to stay in the room with Sally and she was full of wise sass and argument. . . . Loretta would perhaps have been controllable if there had been a Federal Marshall in the house, though I have my doubts.” Such unsympathetic remarks caught Sally up short, and she dismissed them to her husband as “pure Georgia rhetoric,” claiming that Loretta had been “too shy during her visit to do anything but stand around caressing the blond heads of our young.”
While their time together was chaotic, Sally did use the occasion to share an important truth with Flannery, after uneasily holding back. A few weeks into the visit, they drove to Ridgefield to do household errands. On the way back, on a lovely summer’s afternoon, she glanced over at her passenger, wondering how she could disturb such peace; but she had made up her mind, following much inner struggle, that Flannery should finally know the true nature of her illness. At that instant, Flannery happened to mention her arthritis. “Flannery, you don’t have arthritis,” Sally said quickly. “You have lupus.” Reacting to the sudden revelation, Flannery slowly moved her arm from the car door down into her lap, her hand visibly trembling. Sally felt her own knee shaking against the clutch, too, as she continued driving along Seventy Acre Road.
“Well, that’s not good news,” Flannery said, after a few silent, charged moments. “But I can’t thank you enough for telling me. . . . I thought I had lupus, and I thought I was going crazy. I’d a lot rather be sick than crazy.” Reassured that her friend was not going to fall to pieces, Sally pulled off the hilly road, and up the long driveway. They then walked into the kitchen, where Flannery dutifully drank one of her twelve daily glasses of water, on doctor’s orders, as the sounds of the voices of the children playing in the yard, watched by Maria Ivancic, bounced through the open windows. “There’s not much to say about it,” she went on. “But don’t ever tell Regina you told me, because if you do she will never tell you anything else. I might want to know something else sometime.”
Sally was only too happy to agree, relieved that she would not need to confess to Mrs. O’Connor. Their intimate conversation was broken, though, as a baby began to wail. “I have to go,” Sally apologized tentatively, unsure about leaving her alone. “Well, I think I’ll go take a little rest,” Flannery responded. Before walking out the kitchen door to the inner staircase, she turned back once; using the polite Southern expression, she added, “I’m obliged to you.”
“This was devastating knowledge,” Sally Fitzgerald later recalled. “That she was going to have to live with uncertainty, that she would not be autonomous and independent. I didn’t minimize what she would have to go through up in her room over the garage when she left that afternoon after I had told her. But I never really regretted it. I knew it was what Flannery wanted. The atmosphere was cleared.”
Flannery had initially been planning an open-ended stay with the Fitzgeralds, over Regina’s objection, “You always overdo!” But even her six-week visit to Connecticut was cut short a week by a string of unforeseen problems. Having never before encountered a black person, the Slavic nanny, increasingly upset by the presence of Loretta, began scowling and muttering foul phrases in Slovenian. After a protracted spell of such irrational tantrums, Sally, pregnant with a fifth child, became ill and took to her bedroom, threatened with a miscarriage. And Flannery contracted a virus. But rather than panic at her own momentous news, or the mounting illnesses