A Place to Call Home Read Free Page A

brothers and I were born (in the hospital at Gainesville, except for Brady, who came two weeks early in an upstairs bedroom with Mama screaming, “Holt, get me an aspirin!”) the house had ten bedrooms, four bathrooms, and three chimneys, and its bottom-level additionssprawled from a two-story center inside wide porches, front and back. It sat in the center of the Estatoe Valley with round, green mountains rising on all sides. There was not another house, the light of another window, or the soft white smoke from any other chimney in sight. We were a kingdom of our own making.
    Mama ran our household like a business. Spick-and-span, no room for messy customers. Beds made, fresh flowers in the vases, meals on time, clothes mended, silver polished, toilets sparkling, floors waxed, rugs and drapes vacuumed to the dustless sheen of old velvet. She marshaled doctors’ appointments, school activities, and homework. She pickled and preserved, canned and baked; she sent old chairs to be reupholstered and antique mirrors to be resilvered. The land was Daddy’s but the house was hers, and everything that went on in it was under her dominion, and we’d better not forget that.
    Daddy took her on a second honeymoon once to tour the California wine country. She broke out in hives, and they had to come home two days early. “I couldn’t stand all that relaxation,” she said.
    When I was a girl, my British-born Grandmother Delaney (I never called her Grandma—she considered it coarse and disrespectful) and my Great-Grandma Maloney lived with us. I learned the fine points of stubbornness and pride from them. Daddy said the Old Grannies could worry the horns off a brass billy goat, and Mama said anyone who lived in the house with her Mawmaw and Daddy’s grandma could qualify as a saint. Or a lunatic.
    Great-Grandma Maloney was a frisky eighty-eight, while Grandmother Delaney, as she herself reminded us often in her delicate English accent, was a very, very frail seventy. Frail like a cedar stump. Virginia Elizabeth Wallingford Delaney dyed her gray hair a flat, unrelenting nut-brown color and wore it pinned up with a hairpiece of coiled brown braids at the crown, which, combined withher pointy-tipped bifocals, gave her the look of a strangely youthful, squinting, grandmotherly queen.
    She never sat outdoors without a broad-brimmed hat to shade her complexion, which remained, despite jowls and a few age spots, as milky and smooth as a porcelain doll’s. She wore slender, pale dresses with a small cameo brooch anchoring a lace handkerchief to her right shoulder, and if anyone failed to jump up fast enough when she asked for something, she hooked the offender with the brass, goosehead handle of her mahogany cane.
    She always reminded us that she had been only seventeen, an orphan consigned to an English boarding school, when she met Grandpa Patrick Delaney in London during the First World War. She said he was a dashing American infantryman who carried racy postcards of French cabaret dancers in his pockets and regaled her with stories about his Southern homeland. She married him and crossed the ocean with visions of antebellum plantations in her head.
    She never quite forgave Grandpa Patrick after she discovered that her new home was a mountain town fed by dirt roads and the big house a drafty Victorian shared by Grandpa’s overbearing parents and two spinster sisters, Vida and Maedelle. Grandmother Elizabeth was appalled when her female in-laws dipped snuff, wore their stockings rolled down, and drank their tea cold.
    It didn’t soothe her when Grandpa Patrick built her a large, lovely house on a hill just off the courthouse square, or when he bought her a shiny black Model T to drive, while most of the neighbors were still dependent on mule-drawn wagons. She wanted electricity; instead she had kerosene lamps and a woodburning cookstove. She wanted trolleys and cabs and trains; instead she had a dusty car that blew its tires on the