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Apartments, downtown, on Oglethorpe Square. In March 1923, Katie Semmes generously intervened with a favorable deal so that they could move into the pretty Charlton Street town house that she owned on Lafayette Square. Ed O’Connor agreed to pay a minimal monthly rental fee against a modest purchase price loan, basically a private mortgage, of forty-five hundred dollars, to be repaid when his real estate business took off.
    During their first years on Charlton Street, Regina O’Connor’s cool attitude toward her husband’s family grew more pronounced. From conversations with family members, O’Connor’s close friend, as well as editor and biographer, Sally Fitzgerald, later concluded, “There seems little doubt that there were little failures of kindness and tact on the young wife’s part.” One of the faux pas was the announcement of their child’s impending birth, at an evening party. Small cards accompanying the refreshments declared the happy occasion, so the paternal grandmother-to-be learned the news along with the other casual guests. She was “wounded,” and relations with her daughter-in-law grew more strained. Ed O’Connor insisted that his daughter be named after his mother, but since the name Mary could fit either Mary Elizabeth O’Connor or Mary Ellen Flannery, Regina did not find compliance terribly difficult.
    Ed O’Connor’s sense of being outvoted by the women in his wife’s family may well have increased in late 1929 — four years after their daughter’s birth — when Mrs. Semmes departed Monterey Square to move into her Greek Revival home at 211 East Charlton Street, adjacent to, and dwarfing, the O’Connors’ house. With her, she brought not only lots of construction work, but also her unmarried cousin Annie Treanor, an aunt of Regina O’Connor. A few years later, she was joined by Miss M. C. Hynes and the widow Mrs. Fitzpatrick Forston. An early photograph of “Aunt Annie” shows a severe woman in wire-rim spectacles, her white hair gathered in a bun, wearing a long, dark skirt and sweater, dark stockings, and lace-up oxfords, evidently one of those family members that O’Connor felt had never “left the 19th century.” A cousin recalled these Treanor aunts as having a penchant for the word “’umbled, omitting the ‘h.’ Humility was a great message in our family.”
    O’Connor’s early childhood is captured in a collection of family photographs. In the earliest, a series of studio portraits taken for a family Christmas card, the little girl is smiling and charming, legs crossed on a stage prop of a bench, showing all the signs of being, as one family friend has recalled, “beautifully cared for” — in some she is hugging a doll; in others she is posed next to her mother, who reveals a sultry beauty as she stares quietly into the camera. In these staged portraits, mother and daughter look together into the camera. In pictures with her father, the girl turns her beaming face toward his, and he returns her smile. Both parents communicate fond doting in all the shots. A solo portrait of O’Connor, age two or three, sitting on an ottoman, brow furrowed, satin bow in hair, frowning with full concentration into the curled page of a book on her lap, reveals a remarkably self-possessed expression of adult intensity.
    As a little girl, O’Connor’s appearance favored her father. She bore his direct gaze and his clean, handsome features. This resemblance is striking in her confirmation portrait, taken at seven years old. In a dress trimmed in white lace, with her short, straight brown hair combed slickly to the side, she is the mirror image of her clear-eyed father. The adult Flannery O’Connor would become fascinated by the cloning of features between generations, considering them as a sign of some spiritual bond. In “A View of the Woods,” the grandfather finds his granddaughter Mary Fortune’s face “a small replica of the old man’s,” and feels “she was like