- Home
- John Lingan
Homeplace Page 8
Homeplace Read online
Page 8
Perry gave everything one flip with a spatula, then pulled out a platter and put two slices of wheat bread in the toaster. When the pancakes rose, he swept the whole meal off the range top with a few balletic gestures and delivered an absolutely photo-worthy plate to me, topping up the coffee and handing over cutlery and a few napkins. I took the syrup and smothered everything, then picked up a forkful of pancakes with a bit of bacon speared at the end, lifted it to my mouth, and if there hadn’t been a hallelujah chorus playing on the radio I would have heard one anyway. Those classic all-American extremes were balanced perfectly. The cakes were clouds, the bacon was a braid of half-melted fat and crisp streaks. I split the yolk of the eggs and watched the yellow-orange ooze out like molasses. The toast—which, like everything else, was nearly translucent with butter—absorbed it hungrily.
From the catfish to the plentiful butter, Perry’s cooking was straight from the down-home country cookbook. Only lard or grits would have made it more so. But the all-American is unique for being essentially region-less. You can find it anywhere, almost never with local additions. In Kennebunkport or Scottsdale, bacon and eggs are bacon and eggs, and accordingly, it is highway food. Drive any interstate and you will pass billboard after billboard with two shining yolks and a couple strips on a nondescript plate. It is a primary lure of Cracker Barrels, fast-food franchises, and discount hotel chains. It belies no ethnicity or foreign influence. It is simply American, like big-finned Buicks, the Stratocaster, jukeboxes, or Marilyn Monroe. Or Patsy Cline.
His paid work momentarily done, Perry turned back to his stovetop and set a double boiler over heat. He cracked a few more eggs and skillfully juggled them back and forth to separate the yolks, which he threw in the bowl and whisked, nodding along with his friend’s latest tale. After a minute Perry added a little butter, still whisking, then a little more, whisking faster still. Then he cracked a couple eggs into his second pot and split an English muffin. He reached back in the fridge and tossed a slice of thick ham onto the grill next to them, then resumed his stirring. When he pulled out the whisk it carried a cup of lush gold sauce in its wires, and he watched—his weary eyes staring intently, like a hypnotist’s—as the dense, bright treasure curled and drizzled back into its bowl.
“Made something for you,” he told his friend, who had finished her sandwich and sat quietly at last, staring up at the lazily tilting fan on the ceiling. He put the toasted muffin halves on a plate, pulled the ham off the grill with tongs, then scooped the poached eggs from their pot and laid them on gently. He sliced a lemon and squeezed its juice into his sauce, added salt and pepper, then ladled a ribbon onto the eggs.
“That’s called eggs Benedict,” he told her. She looked toward the plate with distrust. Perry laughed.
“Come on now,” he said. “You have to try it. Tell me if I should put it on the menu.”
“What’s that yellow?” She poked it with a fork. The choir proclaimed Jesus’s glory.
“Hollandaise sauce,” he told her. “That’s real food.”
“I never eaten no holiday sauce,” she said, which made Perry double over with laughter.
“Hollandaise, with an S at the end. Ain’t nothing called holiday sauce.” Cautiously, the woman cut a piece and took a bite. She looked even more skeptical once she chewed.
“It’s good,” she said. “I don’t wanna eat anymore but it’s good.” Perry could barely contain himself. At last another customer came, another lone white guy with a crew cut and his plaid shirt tucked into his jeans. He looked his menu over while the fan turned, the gospel soared, the grill hummed, the coffee burbled, and a hard-living woman ate her first-ever eggs Benedict. I swirled a piece of pancake in a pond of butter, syrup, and yolk. Perry came over to fill my coffee; it had never even gotten half-empty since I’d been there.
“Gotta teach these people about real food,” he said under his breath, and I wasn’t sure if my own gluttonous breakfast was being indicted. But I sat there, under Viola Lampkin Brown’s century-old gaze, across the street from a giant fiberglass apple, and thought to myself: Greater obstacles have been overcome.
Part Two
New Ways
4
A Museum and a Mountaintop
The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley isn’t typically open at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings, but this was a special occasion: Labor Day weekend, eight days before what would have been Patsy Cline’s eighty-first birthday. And most important, it was the morning of the grand-opening party for the museum’s newest exhibit, Becoming Patsy Cline, a years-in-the-making collaboration between the curators and JudySue Huyett-Kempf’s organization, Celebrating Patsy Cline. In the wide beaming light of the floor-length conference-room windows, JudySue and her people ambled in and made for the circular, skirted table. They got their plates and hovered around the loose pyramids of scones and Danishes, passing tongs by the spiraling napkin towers.
The men and women near this mountain of flaky carbs and drizzled icing were members of the Always Patsy Cline Fan Organization, and had been invited for a private preview of the exhibit before a country-themed gala that night. Established in 1987, the APCFO is the only official Patsy fan club, charging $15 annual dues ($25 for couples) that entitle members to special offers on merchandise, a quarterly zine, and an invitation to the annual Labor Day gathering in Winchester. For many years, Charlie Dick, Patsy’s widower and her legacy’s faithful steward, ran the organization and hosted the fall festivities, though the leadership had fallen out of the family until recently, when Julie decided to take the helm. Of course, for decades Winchester wasn’t much of a destination except for the ambience; the only Patsy site was her headstone, though the true pilgrims could always head to the Troubadour for Jim’s annual Sunday picnic, a tradition since 1964. But now, in 2013, the historic Cline House was a going tourist concern, Celebrating Patsy Cline appeared ascendant, and the museum had prepared and heavily publicized this exhibit—the first since its opening in 2005 to stray from the unquestioned Wealth, Washington, and War template of Valley greatness.
Around the breakfast buffet, the main conversation concerned who was feeling ambitious enough to get up to the Troubadour in the evening and on Sunday. Julie corroborated that Jim and Bertha had been busy all week preparing for their capstone summer party. Other than two women in their early thirties—a lawyer and a social worker from Washington, D.C.—I was the youngest person around the pastry tower by a good twenty-five years. A few were elderly or near it, the men in camel-hair jackets and their wives in pantsuits and pearls. You could see them weighing the forty-five-minute drive against a strictly regimented bedtime and meal schedule. But everyone agreed that the Troubadour was a worthy destination, this weekend most of all, and some had even been to the picnic before. They spoke of seeing the six-shooter smoker like it was the Elgin Marbles.
Julie arrived with her husband, Richard, a working-class Nashville native just like her. If you didn’t know that she was Patsy’s daughter, her high-cheeked smile would have given it away, though the waist-length, LP-black hair cascading around her shoulders testified to her long-standing taste for ’70s rock over country. She greeted everyone warmly as they loaded up on breakfast and found seats at the conference tables around the carpeted room, then ceded the floor to Julie Armel, the museum’s director of marketing.
“Welcome, and what an honor to have the official Patsy fan club here to open this event,” said Armel, who was also a good bit younger than the average attendee, though she wore pearls of her own and a bright pink jacket—the very model of a public liaison for a heavily endowed private historical museum. “This has been such a long time coming, and I know it means so much for us to have you all here, especially Julie, to open this unique exhibition.”
Her white-haired audience had their backs to the windows, through which the museum grounds were glowing in hazy late-summer light befitting their grand origins. Though the building we were sitting in had been raised less than a decade earlier, the surr
ounding land was some of the most hallowed in the Shenandoah. It was here that the English surveyor James Wood settled with his wife in the early eighteenth century, and it was he who donated land to the state of Virginia in 1744 for the establishment of Winchester, née Frederick Town. Wood’s own estate stayed a family property, and his son built the famed Glen Burnie mansion, one of the most opulent in post-Revolutionary Virginia, in 1794. In the nineteenth century, Wood’s grandson married into the Glass family, members of which eventually left Virginia for Oklahoma where they made a fortune in the oil business. The mansion and its six surrounding acres simply sat there, a massive family retreat on the west end of the city, as Winchester’s downtown grew and the surrounding section of Frederick County became famous for wheat, then apples.
In 1959, as Harry Byrd was running out of worlds to conquer and Patsy Cline was escaping his clutches for Nashville, an Oklahoma-born descendant named Julian Wood Glass Jr. compelled his boyfriend, R. Lee Taylor, to return to Glen Burnie and restore it to its initial glory. Glass was a renowned art collector and aesthete, and he and Taylor saw the Wood family property as a grand canvas in brick, plaster, and soil. As greater Winchester fell into a midcentury frenzy of modernization—interstates, outside businesses, immigration—this man with the founder’s name gave new life to its oldest manse, reclaiming it as a palace of stunning landscaping, matchless interior design, and regal entertaining for the blue bloods and their set. He returned the gardens to their former glory, installing fountains, stone sculptures, pillars, and a cocktail pavilion. The home itself, meanwhile, became the venue for Glass and Taylor’s renowned collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, instruments, and decorative domestic pieces, especially Taylor’s fourteen antique dollhouses.
Despite the earth-shaking physical and cultural changes taking place, this was still the era when Winchester’s purportedly gay children were treated with conversion therapies and sodomy laws were in place and enforced. It almost goes without saying that Glass and Taylor were not “out” by any contemporary measure. In their papers, which have been saved at the museum, they used the code “1-2-3” to communicate “I love you,” though it must have been an open secret to their rarified strata of visitors that these two unmarried, cohabitating art-and-dollhouse collectors weren’t merely roommates, companions, or any other decorous euphemism. Glass was not a public figure like his ancestor; he sought no formal office or influence, and lived only to reestablish his family’s ties to history. In midcentury Winchester, money allowed him the incomplete freedom to live in the closet, compromised yet unharmed. His relationship was simultaneously privileged and constrained, and as complex as such an arrangement might require: Taylor and Glass actually broke up in the 1970s, though Taylor remained on the property in a guesthouse. United in genuine affinity for each other and the historic property they remade, they kept working on the house together into their old age, and planning for it to outlast them. By the time both men died in the 1990s, they had arranged for the mansion to become part of a larger historical complex, and the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley opened a decade later, with a mixture of old money and newer corporate masters on its board and funders’ list.
This conference room, in other words, was the final iteration of a three-centuries-old fortune, the sort that once could shield even gay men from scorn. It would have been unimaginable for a resident of South Kent Street to have ever made it here as a visitor during Patsy’s lifetime, when Glen Burnie was essentially the Versailles of the Valley and the Star still wouldn’t give her the front page for Carnegie Hall. Now she was the subject of a well-publicized, curated homage. If ever proof were needed that the old battle lines were shifting in this community, here it was. If an expensive, expansive cultural institution was to survive here in the twenty-first century, it would need to tempt the region’s middle class, many of whom were more interested and invested in Patsy’s story than in an oil scion’s vase collection.
“So who’s ready to see Becoming Patsy Cline?” asked Julie Armel, whose name rang a bell. I flipped through old notes while our aging crowd raised themselves out of the chairs and a few husbands returned to the pastry table to grab a couple for the road. Down a sunlit hallway we went, through the museum lobby and into a wide doorless entryway that opened to a brightly lit map of the Valley stretching up to the ceiling. Titled “Virginia’s Virginia,” the map was overlaid with a dotted-line trail snaking through every little burg that Patsy had ever spent time in, from her childhood up through her singing career: Middletown, Elkton, Edinburg, Round Hill, and especially Lexington. A small sign acknowledged the exhibit’s underwriters: Celebrating Patsy Cline, of course, as well as the Winchester Harley-Davidson dealership, Shenandoah Country Q102, and the state of Virginia—still, as ever, for lovers.
We walked in, Julie leading the charge. The fan club made a mockery of the museum’s no-photography rule. They snapped away at the life-size archival photographs spread across the wall and at the many artifacts on display to tell the story of Virginia Hensley’s transformation. There was Hilda’s sewing machine and a few of the dresses she made for her daughter; the porch glider that sat outside the South Kent Street front door; and the original microphone from WINC, the one that Jim stood and sang behind on Saturday mornings. It was a massive metal contraption, more weapon than broadcasting instrument, like the hood ornament of a quadruple-size Cadillac.
One couple, middle-aged South Carolinians, found this item particularly satisfying. The woman posed as her husband, in Clemson baseball hat and matching windbreaker, took a photo.
“Carol Glass-Cooper,” she introduced herself, hand outstretched, once the picture was taken. “My husband Mark and I do a Patsy tribute. He plays Jim.”
“‘Daily Walkin’ with Patsy,’” Mark chimed in, scrolling through his phone’s photos.
“We’re performing tonight at the Troubadour,” Carol continued excitedly. “Jim invited us up. We’ve had him down in Seneca for one of our shows before. He sat right onstage with us.”
Other than the microphone and this one excited couple, however, Jim’s role was muted in the exhibit. Instead it was full of lushly written descriptions of Patsy’s early days and little-seen images that showed just how many stylistic iterations she had gone through before her eventual emergence as an elegant Nashville chanteuse. One photograph showed her fronting a band in a sequined minidress and tall heels, while another caption described her brief stint as a singer for a big-band jazz outfit in the early 1950s. Elsewhere, the original Star story on her plane crash revealed just how small she seemed relative to the superstars onboard: “A silver belt buckle engraved with the name ‘Hawkshaw Hawkins’ was found near the wreckage. A woman’s red slip was hanging from a tree.”
The centerpiece, however, was a full room devoted to her performance on Arthur Godfrey’s variety show. No video of the performance exists, but the audio had been discovered and cleaned up for this display. I sat down on one of the benches and listened to the whole clip, which lasted about ten minutes. Apparently Godfrey had read through his sponsor messages too quickly and had to kill time as Patsy and the house band prepared for the cameras. His tactic was to interview Hilda, who was in New York as Patsy’s sponsor for the show, and he spent the greater part of their conversation discussing the ladies’ homeland.
When she said she was from Winchester, Godfrey asked, “Are you a farmer?” Hilda said no, she was “a dressmaker and a homemaker.”
She explained that she wasn’t born in Winchester, but in a small town on North Mountain in the Blue Ridge. Godfrey had spent time in the area, on Catoctin Ridge near Frederick, Maryland. “It looked blue from a distance,” he said, to the murmuring delight of his audience. “But then I’ve never seen a mountain range that didn’t look blue from a distance. Not sure why they call it that.”
He went on, rambling—you could almost hear him peering through the curtains to see when his band was ready. He knew that Winchester was “a big part of the war bet
ween the states,” and that the area was “big apple country.” That, and her current place on Decca Records, was all the mass television audience knew of Patsy Cline before she finally made her debut, preceded by a blast of horns that introduced a slower, sultrier version of “Walkin’ After Midnight” than would appear on record a few weeks later, more of a blues than a country torch song. Patsy leaned into it. Her timing, as ever, was impeccable; she tugged at her low notes and sent the high ones heavenward. Godfrey was right to be impressed, and his audience screamed for her when it came time to choose the episode’s ultimate winner. A few of the assembled fan club members sitting in the room with me applauded as well.
The message, both of Godfrey’s interview and the museum that gave it pride of place in the story of Patsy’s “becoming,” was that she belonged to the Shenandoah Valley, to Virginia. She was apparently a product of apples and Civil War nostalgia and hills that rolled into western Maryland and beyond. I squirmed. Not because this assessment was necessarily wrong, but because it wasn’t adequate. Patsy Cline didn’t acquire firsthand experience of heartbreak and alienation from the Blue Ridge Mountains or Skyline Drive. She got those from Winchester specifically, from the people who treated her family and her music with unconcealed contempt. She got it from a rigid social hierarchy that wasn’t unique to the town, but which certainly defined its residents’ lives. That hierarchy forced her into an early marriage out of desperation, a marriage that strengthened her resolve to sing rather than submit to domesticity. It forged her connection to similar outsiders like Jim McCoy, and informed her worldwide fame as an icon of quiet, unflappable dignity in the face of despair. She wasn’t Patsy Cline because of the Shenandoah—she was Patsy Cline because she grew up poor in its haughtiest city.