At the climax, when host and wine were elevated, my excitement rose with them. As I eagerly awaited my turn to walk the length of the aisle, I felt as if I were on my way to see a close friend. The fact that he was permanently out of town was softened by the mystical connection I could achieve by “receiving the sacrament.”
The Episcopal church seldom mentions heaven and never deals in hell; the confessions indicate that through our daily actions, we make our own here on earth. The best mode of living is to recognize how we “have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep.” Our best plan for salvation is to stop doing “those things we ought not to have done,” and initiate “those things which we ought to have done.” To succeed in this essentially ethical rather than theological program promises “health in us.” In the midst of one of my several emotional crises during college, I looked up “salvation” in the dictionary and found that its root had to do with health of the spirit. As adulthood crept nearer and seemed more frightening, I needed such health badly. I spent increasing time in meditation and religious study, reading about Joan of Arc and the desert fathers, wondering how they escaped having to date and marry.
This vast store of magic and comfort might not have been mine without Mamie’s need to exert herself in devotion to her church and her equally clear need to have me accompany her. I can only conjecture to what extent her seemingly domestic labors in church were in fact powerfully aesthetic for her. But I know that the church buoyed my mother. After a childhood and youth lived in the heart of a privileged South, she chose to make her life with a man who moved her to a dusty, industrial, working-class area. Her tastes were elegant and expensive, yet my father never made more than an adequate salary. Finally, Mamie’s health was problematic for the last fifteen years of her life. On the one hand, her stamina was amazing to watch and hard to match, as I learned when we spent a month on vacation together. She outwalked me and was undaunted by attending nine plays in seven days in New York City. But her neuritis and arthritis clouded many of her days and pained her nights, and her shortness of breath scared her. Evenings when her body must have seemed strangely at odds with her spirit, Mamie would ask me to sit on the side of her bed and read that familiar Ninety-first Psalm to her slowly, sometimes twice for good measure. After my father’s death, she told me repeatedly that without the church and her faith she could not have gone on. Yet that faith manifested itself in dailiness, never becoming theoretical or doctrinal.
She showed me how crucial a woman’s view of Christian theology can be, and when I read Barbara Meyerhoff’s moving account of a community of elderly Jews (Number Our Days), I understood perfectly what one of the women meant by “domestic religion”—a string of daily rituals over which the women in a family preside, that “makes the adrenaline flow” and “changes your entire view on things.” Underscoring the femaleness of this phenomenon, a speaker insists, “These things were injected into you in childhood and chained together with that beautiful grandmother, so ever since infancy you can’t know life without it. . . . [I]n this domestic religion, you could never get rid of it. You could not just put it aside when you don’t agree anymore. When it goes in this way, I describe, Jewish comes up in you from the roots and it stays with you all your life.”
I no longer attend church services or adhere to the formal belief system of my past, but when I enter cool, dimly lit churches, tears come unbidden but familiar. I remember my mother, specifically and tenderly, going about her housewifely duties at church, infusing her and my very breath with something deeply spiritual and unforgettable, something that rises above creeds and denominational hypocrisies, something I cannot “put aside because [I] don’t agree anymore.”
My mother’s yard and garden were legendary in our community. The actual gardening, which went on almost all year, began six months before I was born. Moving from their former house because the new arrival necessitated their having more room, my parents had also bought the vacant lot next door. During her last months of pregnancy, Mamie planted hundreds of iris and jonquil bulbs, sitting on a pillow and sliding down the inclining slope of our yard. That space became a magnificent display of flowers and shrubs.
At its very center stood a terra cotta birdbath. From that core fanned out a series of ever-widening circles bordered by rocks that were always kept in place and free from choking weeds. Within the first circle, surrounding the birdbath, old-fashioned pinks covered the entire ground area. The next somewhat wider circle contained special varieties of jonquils with multicolored centers; Mamie spaced these further apart to allow the best growing conditions for the bulbs and the best viewing for us. Concentric to this middle bed, the largest circle completed the central bedding expanse and housed gorgeous rose bushes in varying shades of red, yellow, and orange.
A second bordering system, made up of long, rectangular beds in which annuals were grown from seed, ran parallel to the lot line. Mamie had a major objection to the idea of using bedding plants. Perhaps it was an attempt to save money somewhere in her life, but I suspect that her motives stemmed from a desire first to watch seeds sending up shoots and then to separate the seedlings with her own hands.
These long edges of the garden area were especially showy at the height of summer: tough zinnias with their scratchy stems; brilliant marigolds, cosmos, dahlias, daisies of many varieties; sweet william and alyssum, baby’s breath, ageratum, dwarf marigolds, tiny zinnias, blue phlox, fever few.
At the end of a bed that edged the property line grew the strangest and most wonderful of all Mamie’s flowers—spider lilies. Their blossoms, at the tops of very tall single stalks, were deep fuchsia with slender tendrils. At their centers were tiny stamen with fuzzy black ends. They had no leaves and were airy and royal. When I moved to the midwest, I searched unsuccessfully for such a lily.
In our backyard there was a magnolia tree that had been planted in 1940 when I was only three. As I waited impatiently for it to grow, Mamie told me gothic stories of mammoth magnolias in Selma, where she had grown up in the first decades of the twentieth century. Our tiny tree had been given to us by a family friend whose father was a judge in the small town of Camden, in the heart of agricultural Alabama. Our friend fancied that having the sapling in her yard would help my mother survive in industrial Fairfield, reminding her of a gracious era vanished with her childhood.
By the time I was in high school, that magnolia was still only about three or four feet tall and was not giving my mother what she wanted most—sumptuous white blossoms, shade from the flaring heat of the sun, and that unmistakably sweet aroma. Then, one day, we were out driving in the country just outside Fairfield when we spied a magnolia tree in full growth and bloom. Nearby stood an old farmhouse to which my father walked to ask the woman of the house if he might buy a bloom or two for his wife. She agreed, and from that day onward, when Mamie was having a special celebration during late spring or summer, Daddy drove out to “our” magnolia, as we thought of it, and brought back a precious blossom or two. My mother lovingly washed off ants or other small bugs that had taken up residence in the spacious hollows and floated the massive flowers in a sterling silver bowl in the center of our dining room table.
Though the magnolia stayed small, we boasted a gigantic oak nearby. Around the base of this great tree, Mamie planted snowdrop bulbs. She said they hardly ever did well for her, but a few survived the damp winters and numerous squirrels who loved the taste of their leaves. They bloomed in February as the true harbinger of spring. All through January, from the time I was eight or nine until well into my teens, I watched them closely, going out back and turning over a few of the leaves my mother so scrupulously placed over them to hide them from the squirrels and to keep them warm. Finally a day would come when the first yellow-green showed above the mulch and dank earth. On that day, Mamie would let me remove the leaves and pour the first water lovingly from a kitchen pitcher. When the snow drops bloomed, I would sit beside them, drawn to the perfectly marked spot of green in the center of each scallop of each bloom. They were special because they were the only flower we grew that was green and because when I looked at the blossoms hanging their heads, I felt less alone in my shyness.
As soon as I knew about saving money, I began to reserve portions of my allowance each year for a special present. Two months before Mamie’s September birthday, I looked through fancy iris catalogues, chose one specimen variety and proudly sent off my seven or eight dollars. She had never grown specimen iris. The hundreds that bloomed down