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but she would’ve stuck her hands in a fan or swallowed lye before admitting this. My grandmother’s final words were, “Marry him, and I will not set foot in your house until you beg me.” She was fully aware that she had not raised the kind of child who would beg for anything, not water in the desert, not bread in a famine, and my mother was aware that her mother’s famous will would keep her out of a house that was only two miles from her own, even on holidays, even on the occasion of my birth in 1924.
    On the other hand, my mother and I were allowed to go to my grandmother’s house, and so we visited there every weekend, and left my father early Christmas mornings, and every Easter and New Year’s Day. But we never spoke of him in her presence. We never mentioned our house, new furniture, new wallpaper or carpeting, and there was never any discussion of when or whether the curse of absence would be lifted. It was as if we walked from nowhere and appeared at my grandmother’s door, but this did not in any way diminish the grand time we had there. We made beignets and drank chickory and played nurse when patients appeared at my grandmother’s door. My mother and grandmother would sit at the kitchen table and discuss investments, studying a company prospectus spread out in front of them the way other women would’ve pointed out new fashions in a department store advertisement. When they reached a decision, we would all ride to town and meet with my grandmother’s broker at Wheat First Securities, who praised her as an intrepid investor in spite of the fact that she would never buy anything on margin.
    Also on those weekends and holidays at my grandmother’s, I listened to many discussions of what my mother was going to do with her life besides read, listen to the radio, volunteer at the Red Cross office, and manage a tidy and efficient household, which amounted to sitting at the breakfast table with Maveen, our combination housekeeper, cook, laundress, and gardener, and listing the daily chores. To most middle-class Southern women of the day, this was more than enough, but to my grandmother it amounted to no more than passing time, waiting for the brittle bones and palsy of old age. The only thing my mother did that my grandmother approved of, besides reading, was teaching me beyond my daily school lessons. On Saturdays my grandmother would ask right away what I had learned that week, and if I said my fourth-grade class was reading “Rip Van Winkle,” she would squint and push her face forward to ask my mother if she had gotten “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from the library yet. It gave my mother a world’s worth of satisfaction to answer, “Yes, and we’re already halfway through it.” My grandmother had spent her childhood receiving parcels of books from the Olivia Raney Library in Raleigh. She told me once, with great assurance, “I have read two books a week for thirty years. I am satisfied that I know everything.”
    Many times my mother and I rode with my grandmother to nurse her family in Pasquotank County. I spent most of my time there playing with cousins, but in 1928 my mother and grandmother took me along on a mission that my mother later characterized as bizarre. I was four years old, and thus the memory cannot be presented as my own. My mother and grandmother told me the story. The three of us drove to Pasquotank County to pick up my grandmother’s oldest sister, and then took her on to Richmond, where her son had just shot himself after having spent two miserable years grieving over the death of Rudolph Valentino. This was the last in the family’s cluster of suicides. We were taking my great-aunt to collect her son’s belongings from a gentlemen’s boardinghouse and make arrangements for his body to be brought back to North Carolina. She sat by my grandmother in the front seat, kneading her hands, screaming, “How did it come to this?” She would lean forward every now and then and