The Age of Infidelity Valerie Sayers (bio) The Age of Infidelity I spent my childhood chasing a vision of my dead sister. In the summer of 1960, the year Holly drowned in the river, she was sweet sixteen. Her boyfriends tied up the party line night and day, and no wonder. She wore crinolines, two or three at least beneath her swirling skirt. She pulled her dark hair back in a poof and curled her bangs so they grazed her eyebrows just so. Did she go dancing in saddle shoes? We had only the one school picture of her on the mantel, all the others packed away. I got my ideas about what she wore from reruns of Dobie Gillis, Holly’s favorite show. And maybe I had to strain to remember how she looked—she was nine years older—but the funny thing was, I could hear her just fine. I could hear her cajoling my mother, clear as if they were standing over me. Can I go out on the river? May I go out on the river. All right. May I go out on the river. No, you may not. I do not trust a teenage boy with a boat. You are the meanest woman who ever walked the earth. Holly’s voice was soft and fluty, bored, and if she used it to drive my mother crazy, my mother got her revenge by bellowing no to whatever Holly asked. My mother was the clearest deepest alto at Division Street Methodist. She had a voice like a bassoon. She kept up the choir after Holly died, she kept up most everything and seemed to be doing as well as anybody could expect of a mother who’d lost half her children, till one day I came home from school to find her crouching in the hallway. It was three years since Holly died. My mother wouldn’t get up off her haunches till I closed all the drapes—she’d seen a gunman on the roof across the way. He’d been watching her for hours, waiting to pick her off. She got the idea from Lee Harvey Oswald, so I guess you could say we were both taking our visions off the tv set. [End Page 111] That first time my mother was up in the state hospital close on to a year, and I wasn’t allowed to go visit, so naturally I pictured her in a damp dungeon with chains around her ankles. My father came back from seeing her with his face gone as gray-green as modeling clay. I figured out I should probably be cooking for him and found my mother’s Lowcountry Receipts. When she was home we didn’t eat anything out of the river, but I got to be pretty good with deviled crab and boiled shrimp, which my father ate like he was scared the ocean might run out. We set down two big plates of shrimp on newspaper, a bowl of melted butter between us, and that was all we needed in the world. Then we made ourselves comfy with the television, which my mother hated. We took to watching the news during supper, and after the news something to make us laugh. When she was finally discharged, her voice muffled so you could hardly understand her, we stopped buying seafood at the docks, and we thought we’d have to turn the tv off, too. But she sat right down with us and watched with a puzzled look on her face, as if everybody onscreen was speaking Hungarian. That I should like That Was the Week That Was was beyond human comprehension, or her comprehension anyway. After a few months had passed, she said: I don’t believe I can live this way. She waited till my father left to hide her pills and to show me just which shelf they would be sitting on in case of emergency. She said that with the help of Jesus she was going to practice mind control and after a week, sure enough, she smiled at the television. After two weeks she laughed till the tears streamed down...
Note.-Tbis interview was conducted via email in Aug. 2010 and Jan. 2012.Among writers work today, Valerie Sayers (born 8 Aug. 1952), who grew up in Beaufort, Carolina, not much more than 30 miles as the crow flies from Flannery O'Connor's Savannah, writes most expressly about the experience of being Irish Catholic in the South.The middle of seven children born to transplants Paul and Janet Hogan Sayers, Valerie Sayers would self-consciously choose to identify with southern culture despite self-professed cultural ignorance. By her own account, her childhood in Beaufort profoundly shaped her world view. As it happened, her life path was such that she wouldn't go home again, or least, she would do so only infrequently. After leaving for college she spent several decades largely in New York, until her appointment to the English faculty the University of Notre Dame in 1993, where she directed the Creative Writing Program and now chairs the English Department. Asked how southerners have received her work, she replied,Oh, the only people who read my work in the are my family and generous reviewers and other Southern writers, and people who read my kind of books are generally the most tolerant of folks. Some friends from high school have been kind enough to read one or two. Being a non-best-selling writer (a gentle way to put it to myself) means a writer can fly way beneath the radar.With her ear for southern dialect and her eye for regional peculiarities, her writing is often infused with the terror of her Catholic South. Though distinctly in the region's religious minority during her childhood, Sayers did not feel herself precisely embattled :Along the coast Catholics were plentiful enough to thrive: Though we were officially designated a mission parish, we had three nuns imported from New York and three priests-a pastor and two curates-all witty and sophisticated enough to leave me with the mistaken impression that Catholics were by definition intellectuals. We were a jolly, social bunch: Catholics drank and smoked and danced, and my Baptist friends were scandalized by our raucous ways. In the summer we bunked Camp Saint Mary's, on the Okatee River, where we recited the Magnificat picnic tables and met Catholic kids from upstate who told us they tried to keep their religion quiet, on account of the Klan. My mother insisted on the opposite: We must let people know we were Catholic, and if we accidentally wore a bit of orange on Saint Patrick's Day, back we went for greener clothing. (Land's End 21)Sayers grew up with an awareness of the importance of being Irish, too. When asked to define the authentic Irishman, she riffed on James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: one living in silence, exile, and cunning? Within the nexus of the small Catholic world of coastal Carolina and Georgia, Valerie Sayers and Pat Conroy, one generation removed from Flannery O'Connor, were likely to meet, and indeed they did cross paths. Graduated from Beaufort High School in 1963, Pat Conroy returned from The Citadel as a rosy-cheeked teacher in the autumn of 1967, enthralling students, including Sayers, who took his psychology class. (Sayers's father, a civilian psychologist who vetted Parris Island recruits, liked to cross-examine her about the course.) The Beaufort the two writers knew was an unassuming military beach town of some 7,500 souls that held rich and poor a short arm's length from one another (Land's End 21). The prevailing atmosphere of beach-town insouciance, military functionalism, and an older brought together shotgun shacks and the shabby gentility of old cottages. If I was acutely aware of wealth and poverty, I was also pretty sure my family's identity wasn't based on economics but on religion. We were Catholics in the Protestant South (21).Sayers graduated from Beaufort High School to attend Fordham University in 1969and returned, like Conroy, to teach for a year in Beaufort, in her case, at a brand-new technical college, where [her] classes were almost evenly black and white and full of frank, angry, forgiving talk about race. …
Call me Isobelle -at least, that's what my card says. I'd like it better if you call me the cleaning lady to the stars, a.k.a. the professors at St. Meinhof 's. They move in here trailing a van full of kitchen gear they don't know how to use, wearing their attitudes like tiaras. One of them got the card made up for me cos she thought it was cute. I thought it was embarrassing, but she was right about one thing: you got to have a business card if you want to scrub professors' toilets. They check references, too.
