Sweet and Low by Nick White

Author:Nick White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

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ALTHOUGH THEY WERE TWINS, Uncle Lucas and Aunt Mavis looked nothing alike. Uncle Lucas had the same blunt nose and wide mouth that my father had. Aunt Mavis, on the other hand, possessed the narrow face and delicate features of a French aristocrat.

In her college days at Ole Miss, she fancied herself something of a poet. She wrote her senior thesis on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, and had plans of attending graduate school, but after graduation, my grandfather suddenly died, so she stayed behind “to see about things” for a while. Twenty years later and she was still seeing about things and remained single.

Uncle Lucas never married either, and for most of their lives, they lived together in the same house on Claymore Street, and I lived with them during my teenage years while my mother was away. I remember, before she left me with them, that she told me to be kind to my aunt and uncle because I was all they had left in the world and, besides, I wouldn’t have to stay with them long anyway, just until she got herself settled in Nashville. I was ten, and four years later, around the time of the bachelor party, I wouldn’t have left them for anything. We were, for better or worse, a family. We had long dinners together, where Aunt Mavis and I listened to Uncle Lucas go on in his usual manner. We saw plays and ballets in Jackson at Thalia Mara Hall, took weekend vacations to Biloxi and Memphis and New Orleans. All this time, I considered us outsiders—not just in the town, but in life itself, and a certain closeness developed among the three of us, an intimacy the likes of which I’d never known.

Now I see that this business about being outsiders was perhaps more complicated than I’d first imagined. I think we knew, on some instinctual level, that we could never be like them, the rest of the town, and likewise, they didn’t see any reason for trying life our way. The town, for the most part, was hunkered down in the insular culture of Little League and church and bunko, and though there is, to my mind, nothing especially wrong with that, our interests lay elsewhere. In a place where every household seemed to have a garden, we kept our lawn bare and preferred the comforts of the indoors where, during the hot months—July and August and sometimes September—we’d spend the long sweltering afternoons reading, cushioned from the heat by a loud AC unit my grandfather had bought at Sears many years ago. We were always reading something. Stacks of books—more like walls of them—lined the hallways and covered the dining-room table and propped open doors. Aunt Mavis mainly read volumes of poetry while Uncle Lucas and I devoured novels, the trashier the better. One summer we made our way through the complete works of Miss Jacqueline Susann (Aunt Mavis, of course, had no idea). Some nights my aunt and uncle would get a wild hair and read passages from Shakespeare or Auden aloud.

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