Barter

Abstract

EXCERPT FROM LEARNING TO FLY: A MEMOIR Barter_______________________________ Mary Lee Settle Editor's note: This is a completely unedited chapterfrom Mary Lee Settle 's memoir, forthcomingfrom W. W. Norton, reprinted here exactly as she left it by permissionfrom herfamily, her editor and her agent. On my twenty first birthday I danced a Viennese waltz with Prince Serge Oblenski on the St Regis roof. I wore an ice blue satin evening dress which had been bought for me to take to Sweetbriar. But I was sent to New York instead. It was, inadvertently, my mother's decision. It had to do with condemnation rights, the PWA and Franklin Roosevelt, all of which had, in Miss Addie's words, saved their bacon. Although she hadn't voted for him, Miss Addie accepted Roosevelt, but she hated Henry Wallace, the Secretary of Agriculture because he had little pigs killed when people were hungry. None of this seemed to affect me at the time. I was busy getting on my mother's nerves down river in Charleston. I was, for her, an ever present finger nail on a blackboard. She loved silence and being alone. I can understand now, but then it was a wall I kept trying to climb, demanding that she at least notice me that only once succeeded. One morning she noticed me enough to throw a shoe at me, the only time I ever saw her lose the cliff edge poise she so needed in such a dark time. When the bedroom slipper hit my arm I knew that she knew that I was there. I have never forgotten it. For a little while, I respected and liked her. Her dreams had clashed with mine, and there was nothing that she could do about it except ignore mine, control them, or put them down with a famous wit in her family that bit like a snake. Her dreams were finally coming true, and I was in their way. I was going to become a classic actress, preferably Shakespeare. This was not, to me, a hope, but a fact. It had been since I climbed the attic stairs at the Mason School of Music when I was nine, and found Mr. Maurice Drew, an ex-actor. Maybe he had been flotsam from a showboat. I never knew what had marooned him in Charleston, West Virginia. I only know that a long road began with a climb up the stairs to the attic of the Mason School of Music. We studied Shakespeare together when my parents thought I was learning "pieces", and getting 41 rid of what they had decided was a speech impediment. It was their conscious decision. The overwhelming force behind it, never recognized , was that my mother was a woman with a desperate need to be alone as others need food. So Mr. Drew was my baby sitter every Wednesday afternoon. Then the miracles began to happen. Roosevelt was elected. Nobody who did not live through that time can imagine the impact of that election. My father, as a civil engineer, was prosperous for the first time since the mine he managed until I was six, closed. He could help fight the depression by putting people to work. He recovered from the agonizing tic dolorosa which had hounded him for years. Then there was the third miracle which was not a miracle except to my mother. The state of West Virginia condemned the air over the family house at Cedar Grove where my mother's parents, and then for years, her widowed mother, had raised a family. During the depression she had been a great tree under which her children all sheltered, including my mother. A ramp was to be built over what my grandmother called her piece of property, and my mother called the estate. I guess it made it less painful to fly over the little coal town where the tenant houses were neglected, except when Miss Addie took hammer and nails and fixed what she could. They sagged, human looking and sad, as if they had been left out in the rain. But by the good fortune of receiving her share of the condemnation rights, where...