Hanging Around in Doorways

I first read Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) in my twenties – a teaching colleague had recommended it – and loved it. I took it at face value: I enjoyed its plot, succumbed to its atmosphere, appreciated its descriptions and believed in its characters. I remembered it as a Good Book and sought out others by McCullers (always admiring her titles – The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Café). But in your twenties you are robust, busy looking ahead and perhaps less inclined to dwell on the past. You don’t necessarily think sad stories apply to you. Now, rereading it several decades later, I am surprised at how moved I am by Frankie, the central character, and how much I identify with her. Which is odd, considering she is a 12-year-old on the brink of adolescence and I am 72.

Frankie, whose mother died giving birth to her, is taken care of by Berenice the housekeeper, while her father, when he is present, is tired and abstracted: I had two perfectly good parents but because my father worked overseas I was sent to boarding-school in England at 11, spending school holidays with my grandmother who was in her eighties. Frankie misses her older brother, Jarvis, who is a corporal in the army and has been away in Alaska for two years: I had an older sister and brother who had both moved on to more exciting lives by the time I reached boarding-school so, while admiring them from afar, I saw them only sporadically. Frankie’s school holidays are uneventful and tedious, and much of her time is spent in the kitchen with Berenice and her 6-year-old cousin John Henry, eating the same meals, telling the same stories, playing the same card games: I occasionally went to stay with a schoolfriend and remember spending hour upon hour – when we were not reading Georgette Heyer – knitting and talking. Carson McCullers wrote this book for me, of course she did. Frankie’s story takes place in an unnamed American state towards the end of the Second World War; she daydreams about Alaska, about the distant countries where the war is taking place, about the places she intends to visit. But the local children do not include her in their games, her best friend has moved away, the Red Cross will not take her blood because she is too young, and her brother is getting married; everything seems to be happening somewhere else, away from her. ‘She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.’ Her fear makes her volatile, disagreeable. Alternately bullying and leaning on John Henry – his company is better than no company – and both abusing and depending upon Berenice, Frankie is told that sometimes she is ‘too mean to live’. She is confused and unpredictable, hates to sleep alone yet keeps her suitcase packed and ready to go. Berenice does her dogged best but Frankie’s lack of a mother is evident: she pays scant regard to washing, she guzzles sweetened condensed milk and crackers whenever she pleases, she is alarmingly good at knife-throwing. She wanders around the town alone, her combination of stroppiness and innocence looking likely to put her in harm’s way. Recently grown tall for her age she worries that if she keeps growing at this rate she will become a freak, and she hates the way she looks. Seeking reassurance from Berenice on this point, she is told she will do very well ‘if you file down them horns a inch or two’. The wedding of the title is that of Jarvis to his fiancée Janice; they visit two days before the wedding and Frankie is so smitten by them that she changes her name to F. Jasmine to echo theirs. She also hatches a plan to go off with them after the wedding and never return home, convincing herself that they will take her and that together they will visit the four corners of the world. The wedding, and the marriage, will be something Frankie can belong to at last.

Yesterday, and all the twelve years of her life, she had been . . . an I person who had to walk around and do things by herself. Now all this was suddenly over with and changed. There was her brother and the bride, and it was as though when she first saw them she understood something she had known inside of her: They are the we of me.

Because Frankie hangs around in doorways, looking on but not participating, she is a sharp observer. We see the characters through her eyes and her descriptions are unflinching:

There was only one thing wrong about Berenice – her left eye was bright blue glass. It stared out fixed and wild from her quiet, coloured face, and why she had wanted a blue eye nobody human would ever know. Her right eye was dark and sad. Berenice dealt slowly, licking her thumb when the sweaty cards stuck together.

John Henry, her cousin, is small for a 6-year-old ‘but he had the largest knees that Frankie had ever seen, and on one of them there was always a scab or bandage . . . [He] had a little screwed white face and he wore tiny gold-rimmed glasses. He watched all of the cards very carefully, because he was in debt; he owed Berenice more than five million dollars.’ McCullers powerfully conjures up the atmosphere of the long, hot afternoons spent with Berenice and John Henry in the kitchen, playing cards and talking. John Henry has covered the walls with ‘queer, child drawings, as far up as his arm would reach. This gave the kitchen a crazy look, like that of a room in the crazy-house.’ They are almost drugged with the heat, with the predictability of each other’s conversation, and it is this feeling of stasis that illuminates so well Frankie’s frustration. Berenice retells, in her ‘dark gold voice’, the story of her four husbands, John Henry cheats at cards, they hear the rat rustle behind the wall, but almost the worst thing is the distant piano being tuned somewhere in the neighbourhood:

in a dreaming way a chain of chords climbed slowly upward like a flight of castle stairs: but just at the end, when the eighth chord should have sounded and the scale made complete, there was a stop . . . The seventh chord, which seems to echo all of the unfinished scale, struck and insisted again and again. And finally there was a silence. F. Jasmine and John Henry and Berenice looked at each other. ‘Jesus!’ said Berenice. ‘I seriously believe this will be the last straw.’ John Henry shivered. ‘Me too,’ he said.

The unfinished scale echoes the inarticulate, anguished conversations in which poor Frankie struggles to understand the world and her place in it; Berenice tries to answer her questions but can only offer thin comfort, saying, ‘We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself . . . I’m caught worse than you is, because I am black . . . they done drawn completely extra bounds around all coloured people.’ This convincing sense of place is not restricted to the kitchen; we see the town through Frankie’s eyes too. She passes a fish shop where the shocked eyes of a single fish stare from some crushed ice in the window, a pawnshop, ‘a second-hand clothing store with out-of-style garments hanging from the narrow entrance and a row of broken shoes lined up on the sidewalk outside’. Elsewhere in her wanderings, she notices the drowsing quietness of a street where

even the very cars, parked slantwise with their noses towards the centre aisle of grass, were like exhausted cars that have all gone to sleep . . . The sun took the colour from the sky and the brick stores seemed shrunken, dark, beneath the glare – one building had an overhanging cornice at the top which, from a distance, gave it the queer look of a brick building that has begun to melt.

Cars going to sleep, buildings melting: powerful images and exactly what might spring into the mind of an observant child. Frankie is so sharply aware of her surroundings it’s almost as if she is skinned; she is in a raw, nervous state of expectation and heightened emotion which I can – just about – remember from my own adolescence. She, and we, know that something is about to happen, and her fear is infectious. For all its dreamy atmosphere this is a tightly plotted book with plenty of drama and some unexpected, shocking outcomes: there is humour, love, danger and grief – but its greatest strength for me is the way in which McCullers depicts the unhappiness of growing up. I know Frankie and I understand her pain: I too wanted to escape but also needed to belong. To be so vividly reminded of all this seems to me a clever trick at such a distance.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Posy Fallowfield 2024