Lilly was our family’s third and last dog, a black miniature French poodle. My father named her Lilly “because she was so white.” Her A.K.C. name was Lillian Churchill. My parents admired Churchill, “he saved Europe;” but they couldn’t name me Winston because I had to be named after my father—living in the South and the first born son—and my father disliked middle names; and the other two children were girls; and though both parents had been out of the medical corps for thirteen years and hated the army—among other things, for confining them to separate barracks on their wedding night—they believed that the war had been just; they had served in the European theatre, both enlistees, rather than the Pacific—or the dog’s name would have been Lillian MacArthur; so Churchill ended up on the dog.
When I achieved first sentience, there was Grey Lady, a benign setter as tall as I, who had puppies under the breakfast room table on East Lake Road and expired placidly a year later. My parents replaced her with Poochie—Peanut Butter was his real name—a welterweight boxer of such exuberance he was finally confined to our back yard playspace for the crime of constantly jumping up and bowling us kids down. He then owned the yard, which none of us would dare enter until mother hauled him plantfooted into the house. He developed a great attraction for the mailman and was always escaping to chase his little step van. The attraction blossomed into affection one day when the man stopped the truck, Peanut Butter leaped in, and with the acquiescence of our mother and the grateful blessings of us kids, they both sped off on his appointed rounds. That was the last we saw of Peanut Butter.
We moved to Oakdale Road when I was ten—a classy neighborhood with huge lots near Emory University. My guess is Lilly was my dad’s idea; I was eleven then. He had succeeded in converting mom to his religion of alcoholism—the martini denomination—some time in my early childhood. I suspect that her conversion was a long time developing because she had such a strong survival instinct: she drank all her life and never let it kill her like it did my father. I realized when I was older that she had come to drink out of loneliness. In those days women married to doctors were not supposed to work—even though my mother was a very competent nurse—so in the interim between den mothering Cub Scouts and becoming my “go-to” wrestling advisor and cheer leader in high school, she grew very lonely with all of us off to school and nothing to do but laundry and vacuuming. By the late ‘Fifties a maid was un-cool, though if there was a yard man it was not frowned upon, nor, if you were genuinely wealthy, was a butler or a “house-boy.” My father’s medical partner, married to a banker’s only daughter, had an aged Chinese man. My mother couldn’t do coffee klatches, not being Jewish, nor lounge by the pool and have affairs, being Catholic; PTA fell away and she was not devout enough for the Altar and Rosary Society. She was trapped in our conurbation, trapped by our—what was later banally referred to as—life-style: too well off to work, not wealthy enough to flaunt both the mores of the Catholic Church and the South. So it was “get her a dog; it’ll be good company,” right?
They’re all gone now, so I can tell their stories without hurting anyone but me. Lilly was good company though just a dog. My mother did not finally cave in and have an affair until Lilly was accidentally run over by the dry-cleaning deliveryman. It was my younger sister, home like the rest of us to bury my father, who discovered the red bikini panties in a drawer in her room, into which my mother had moved for temporary nightly reprieve from my father’s alcoholism. We knew, then, why our mother had gone so around the bend when first her psychiatrist, “an old family friend,” and then my father, had died within two weeks of each other.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment