Blue Marlin

IN 1958, WHEN my father had his famous affair with Carroll Byrd, I knew it before anybody. I don’t know how long he’d been having the affair before I found out about it—or, to be exact, before I realized it. Before it came over me. One day I was riding my bike all over town the way I always did, and the next day I was riding my bike all over town knowing it, and this knowledge gave an extra depth, a heightened dimension and color, to everything. Before, I’d been just any old thirteen-year-old girl on a bike. Now I was a girl whose father was having an affair—a tragic girl, a dramatic girl. A girl with a burning secret. Everything was different.

All my conversations, especially my conversations with my mother, became almost electrical, charged with hidden import: pregnant with meaning, in the lingo of the love magazines and movie magazines she was constantly reading. Well, okay, we were constantly reading. For my mother loved the lives of the stars above all else. She hated regular newspapers. She hated facts. She also hated club meetings, housework, politics, business, and her mother-in-law. She was not civic. She adored shopping, friends, cooking, gardening, dancing, children and babies and kittens (all little helpless things, actually), and my father. Especially she adored my father. Mama’s favorite word was sweet. She’d cry at the drop of a hat, and kept a clump of pink Kleenex tucked into her bosom at all times, just in case. She called people poor souls.

That spring, Elizabeth Taylor was the poorest soul around, when Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash one week before the Academy Awards. Elizabeth, clutching their tiny baby, Liza, was in shock as her Hollywood and New York friends rallied to her side. The industry had never seen such a dynamo as Todd, whose electric energy sparked everyone. Just a few weeks before Todd’s death, he had celebrated Elizabeth’s twenty-sixth birthday by giving her a dazzling diamond necklace at the Golden Globe Awards dinner.

Not a poor soul was Ava Gardner, who had divorced Frank Sinatra for the Italian actor Walter Chiari and now was trying to steal Shelley Winters’s husband, Anthony Franciosa, playing opposite her in The Naked Maja, currently being filmed in Rome.

"Can you imagine?" My mother, clutching Photoplay, was outraged. Isn’t Ava ever satisfied? Just think how Shelley Winters must feel!

It’s terrible, I agreed. If you only knew, I thought. I sat down on the edge of the chaise lounge to peer at the pictures of Ava and Shelley and Tony in a Roman nightclub.

"Look at that dress." Mama pointed to Ava.

What a bitch, I said loyally. If you only knew, I thought. Honestly, Jenny, such language! But Mama was giggling.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.

Nothing, was the answer to that, already clear to both of us. The fact is, I was just too much for Mama, coming along to them so late in life (a surprise), after my two older sisters had already sapped her strength and lowered her resistance, as she said, to all kinds of things, including migraine headaches, asthma, and a heart murmur. These ailments required her to lie down a lot but did not prevent her from being perfectly beautiful, as always.

My mother was widely known as one of the most beautiful women in Virginia, everybody said so. Previously she had been the most beautiful girl in Charleston, South Carolina, where she had grown up as Billie Rutledge and lived until she married my father, John Fitzhugh Dale, Jr., a naval officer stationed there briefly during the war. Just long enough to sweep me off my feet, as she put it. He was a divine dancer, and my most cherished image of my parents involved them waltzing grandly around a ballroom floor, she in a long white gown, he in a snappy uniform, her hair and the buttons on the uniform gleaming golden in the light from the sparkling chandeliers.

Thus she became Billie Rutledge Dale, in a ceremony I loved to imagine. It was a wedding of superlatives: the handsomest couple in the world, a wedding cake six feet high, a gown with a train fifteen feet long, ten bridesmaids, a horse and buggy—not to mention a former suitor’s suicide attempt the night before, while everybody else was dancing the night away at the rehearsal dinner. I was especially fascinated by this unsuccessful project, which had involved the young man’s trying to hang himself from a coat rack in a downtown men’s club, after which he was forever referred to as Bobby Too Tall Burkes.

Some people said Mama looked like Marilyn Monroe, but I didn’t think so; Mama was bigger, blonder, paler, softer, with a sort of inflatable celluloid prettiness. She looked like a great big baby doll. People also said I took after Mama, but this wasn’t true, either, at least not yet, and I didn’t want it to become true, at least not entirely, as I feared that taking after her too much might eventually damn me into lying down a lot of the time, which looked pretty boring.

On the other hand, I was simply dying to get my period, grow breasts, turn into a sexpot, and do as much damage as Mama, who had broken every heart in Charleston and had a charm bracelet made out of fraternity pins to prove it. She used to tick them off for me one by one. Now that was Smedes Black, a Phi Delt from UVA, such a darling boy, and this one was Parker Winthrop, a Sigma Chi at W and L, he used to play the ukulele … I was drunk on the sound of so many alphabetical syllables. My mother had come out in Charleston; my sisters had attended St. Catherine’s School and then come out in Richmond, since nobody did such a thing in Lewisville, outside Lynchburg, where we lived. I was expected to follow in my sisters’ footsteps.

But then our paths would diverge, as I secretly planned to go up north to college before becoming (to everyone’s total astonishment) a writer. First I would write steamy novels about my own hot love life, eventually getting world-famous like Grace Metalious. I would make millions of dollars and give it all away to starving children in foreign lands. I would win the Nobel Prize. Then I would become a vegetarian poet in Greenwich Village. I would live for Art.

I had a big future ahead of me. But so far, nothing doing. No breasts, no period, no sex, no art. Though very blonde, I was just any skinny, pale, wispy-haired kid on a bike, quick as a rabbit, fast as a bird, riding invisible all over town, bearing my awful secret.

I KNEW WHO SHE was, of course. Everyone knew. Her father, Old Man Byrd, had been the county judge for forty years. After retirement, he became a hermit—or as close to a hermit as it was possible to be in Lewisville, which was chock-full of neighborly curious people naturally bound and determined to look after one another all the time. (I swear to God, my father remarked once in exasperation, "if the devil himself moved into this town, I guess you’d take him a casserole, too!") Judge Byrd was a wild-looking, white-haired, ugly old man whose eyebrows grew all the way across his face in the most alarming fashion; he walked bent over, leaning on a walking stick topped by a carved ivory skull, yelling at children. He smelled bad. He did not socialize. He did not go to church, and was rumored to be an atheist. When he died, everyone was shocked to learn that there would be no funeral, unheard of in our town. Furthermore, he was to be cremated.

I remember the conversation Mama and Daddy had about it at the time.

Cremated … Mama mused. Isn’t that sort of … communist? Don’t they do it in Russia and places like that?

Lord, no, honey. Daddy was laughing. It’s perfectly common, in this country as well as abroad. For one thing, it’s a lot more economical.

"Well, it certainly isn’t southern, Mama sniffed. And I certainly don’t intend to have it done to me. Are you listening, John? I want my body to remain as intact as possible, and I want to be buried with all my rings on. And a nice suit, or maybe a dress with a little matching jacket. And I want lots of yellow roses, as in life."

Yes, Billie. Daddy hid a smile as he went out the door. He was Old Man Byrd’s lawyer, and so was in charge of the arrangements. I couldn’t