Thoughts From the Front Porch

Doc & Kathleen

Kathleen had always been attractive and she knew it. It seems she was born knowing it, but not in an arrogant sense of knowing she was beautiful. She’d just grown accustomed to being treated that way by man and woman, girl and boy, old and young.  It was just a fact of her existence. And she didn’t give it any more weight or importance than the fact of her hazel eyes.

She gave little thought to her looks or to her uncanny ability to attract. Sometimes she’d work all day in the her kitchen or her garden, with her hair pulled back out of her way and untidy, tendrils escaping as the air grew steamy and the work wore on. She didn’t consider paint and powder a necessity for the canning of green beans. She worked with no stockings on, like as not with bare feet, and in some frumpy garb. In a time when glamour was considered a woman’s most valuable commodity, Kathleen often didn’t care what she looked like. If she ran short of canning jars in the middle of putting up a batch of fig jam, she simply went after them as she was. Other women would’ve been horrified to be seen town without hair done and face made up, in a house dress, bare-legged and uncorseted.

In fact, for some reason, other women were slighted irritated that Kathleen sometimes took so little pride in her appearance. Kathleen didn’t care if she nettled the neighbor ladies or annoyed the WMU and the WSCS. She was much more concerned with the task at hand than the impression she made at the hardware store. She thought it was ridiculous to dress in finery for a housewife’s trip to town. It more or less proved that you didn’t have any better place to go. While women whispered haughty remarks about her shocking lack of chic, men would smile to themselves at how foolish women are. It should’ve tickled other women pink to have a point of pride with which she couldn’t compete. But the problem really was that she could.

When she felt like putting on the ritz, when she had a reason, Kathleen was the most fashionable and fetching woman in town. It’s fun for a woman sometimes to dress up when she has nice things that suit her well. And Kathleen did. She knew how to choose what looked best for her. She knew her own style. I heard a woman, who was younger than Kathleen, say that she sat at the corner drugstore drinking coffee many afternoons, hoping to see Kathleen come in so she could get a look at what she would be wearing. She said Kathleen had a way of wearing a garment that made every woman want one just like it. But nothing ever looked as good on anybody else.

Kathleen wasn’t just pretty. That wasn’t it at all. She had a vitality that animated those eyes and warmed her cream and pink complexion. She was intelligent and talented, fun and charming. I don’t know whether she learned charm, or if it just came naturally to her. But it began with one simple thing. And that one thing was a genuine interest in other people. Kathleen was interested in people. So they of course had no choice but to be fascinated by Kathleen.

As she grew up, Kathleen learned that she’d need defenses against some people, those who seemed unreasonably to fall in love with her. Men were drawn to her. Women wanted to be a part of her circle.  Life in a town of five or six hundred people means, simply, that until they move away or die, everyone is always there. You may as well learn to like the ones you can and endure the ones you can’t. But they must be dealt with. So Kathleen learned to evade most unwanted advances, skillfully, without causing a big fuss.

A few, mostly women, resented her charisma or magnetism, or whatever it was she had. Some, the ones with too little regard for their own value, were suspicious of her. They always, always thought Kathleen wanted their husbands or boyfriends for herself, when of course she had no interest in them in that way whatsoever. She was just interested in them each as individuals who made up her tiny sphere of existence. She might ask about a hobby or a inquire about a specific task she was aware of, or indulge in a running joke just to make the room warmer and keep a cozy conversation rolling. “How’s the fishing, Joe?” or “Still paintin’ that fence, Oscar?”

She could make a people laugh with a simple dry remark, because she timed it to be unexpected. Her timing wasn’t calculated. It was just a gift, a part of her nature. Then a wife would look at her husband and see his smile and suddenly feel inadequate. And unaware of their little drama, Kathleen had already moved on to the next thing. Sometimes a man would observe her attentions to other men, her small-talk questions and the earnest ear with which she listened, and conclude that Kathleen was “man-crazy.” A plainer woman doing exactly the same, he would’ve called very nice, or more likely, he wouldn’t have noticed her at all.

Men wanted what men always want to one degree or another: her attention. Some wanted only the casual company of such a woman. Once in a blue moon, it was something more threatening, more forbidden that they wanted, a certain kind of proprietary rights. They wanted to own her outright, by force if necessary. Most fell in the gamut between the extremes. The rare and really ravenous hovered around her circle like birds of prey, waiting for their chance to strike. She could see them coming from way off. She learned to bob and weave and laugh in the right places, as if they were all in on the joke, to allow them to save their faces and everyone to escape with grace. The message she silently sent was their only out: “You can’t be serious. Take this lifeline. There will not be another.” She could and would be more direct if her first lines of defense were breached. That was one of the most charming things about Kathleen. She had a little store of danger inside her that surprised people. And most folks loved and admired her all the more for it. “Don’t push me into that corner. I will not be pushed.” As a rule, people learned not to push.

It could have been Kathleen’s terrible, outspoken temper that cost her the early marriages. She was given to sudden fits of fury. She didn’t mind saying exactly what was on her mind. She didn’t mind defending her territory. Or maybe it was her magnetism. It’s hard on a man to see his wife in that way through other men’s eyes. Only the most secure, as very few young men are, could endure this awareness without desperate jealousy. One of Doc’s  most attractive attributes was that he was confident of his own worth. He was never jealous. Doc accepted Kathleen exactly as she was and understood her.

It was Doc’s own reaction to Kathleen that he did not understand. His first wife had been mild as milk. Kathleen was strong and fiery as brandy. She set alight an entirely new spectrum of emotions in Doc, both tender and furious. But he always remembered how she cared for him and took care of him, how she made home the only place he really wanted to go to. Like an Alabama spring, Kathleen could be delightful for long stretches. But the possibility was always there of a sudden storm followed by a cold snap and killing frost that gave way, without reason, on a golden morning when all was well again.  No logic could predict those storms of temper or explain her capacity to strike dread and devotion into a man’s heart as a hammer thunders into an anvil.

The first time Kathleen ran across Byrd Richardson after he’d taken Doc off to Memphis and left him there, she told him exactly what she thought of that hoodwink in great detail and sightly salty language. It happened to be on the sidewalk in front of the bank building. It drew the attention of a small but cautious crowd. They kept their distance and pretended not to hear. Byrd, unaccustomed to such hostility (or even disrespect) from anyone and especially a woman, was stunned speechless and humiliated. He experienced a sudden revelation. She was not afraid of him. He was afraid of her. This was an entirely new sensation for the favorite son of the county’s wealthiest family. He had always wanted to add Kathleen to his list of conquests. But now she’d unintentionally lit a holocaust in him. For once in his life he wanted something that he feared he would never get.

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved.

The Right Southern Corner