The Merry Widow

My mother was born Delilah Mae Teddlie in Texas at the beginning of the century. Her father, Jim Teddlie, was a railroad johnny, one of those men who repaired track or laid it. He died when my mother was seven or eight. She used to say he died of malaria while working in the swamps around Houston, but she had a postcard from him which he’d sent from a hospital in Colorado; perhaps he had tuberculosis. Was TB a more shameful disease than malaria? Was it the Aids of its day?

Mother always thought the loss of her father when she was still a child had instilled in her a floating, but permanent, dread of being abandoned by a man, a crucial man, or just by men, men in general. She had a very posed photo of her straight-nosed, square-jawed, wavy-haired father, looking no more than twenty-seven, in a rocking chair, while her full-faced ageless mother, Willie Lulu, hovered behind him in clean, copious laces, her glossy hair pulled back in a bun. She was standing and he sitting, the reverse of the usual positions for men and women in that day and age. My mother’s brother, Jack, stood off to one side in short pants, with freckles and anger written all over his face. Beside him in a blur was my tiny mother as a five year old with a big, vague, white bow in her hair; the blur seemed to have been generated by the intensity of her feelings—or by a sudden movement. I’m sure that even then she never stood still.