Charming Grace Read Online Free PDF Page A

when it came to joy. She made a long hike into the deep, mountainous woods behind Bagshaw Downs, ancestral home of her new deep-South in-laws, despite being eight months’ pregnant with me. Willy insisted to my father that she could manage the three-mile round-trip hike. She wanted to see his family’s legendary ladyslipper orchid glen in full bloom. The hidden hollow had been named Ladyslipper Lost by a melodramatic Bagshaw—“melodramatic” and “Bagshaw” being redundant—in Victorian times.
    “I want to paint Ladyslipper Lost, Jimmy,” she said. She was an artist, and flowers were her specialty. When she and Dad reached the amazing hollow she cried, laughed, and sat down, enchanted among the pink orchids. “Jimmy,” she said in her Carly Simon clarinet voice, “My water just broke and I think I’m going to bloom right here with these fantastic plants.”
    “No, no, no,” said my dad, who thought she was joking. “Bagshaws have their babies in hospitals now. My father made it a rule after I was born. My mother spent twenty hours in labor—with no painkillers—in a bedroom at the Downs, while my father, our private doctor, and a hired nurse kept telling her, ‘Think patriotic thoughts, Helen. Japan just surrendered to the Allies!’ My mother finally said to my father, ‘I can wave the goddamn flag or I can give birth. I can’t do both. Now please get me a big drink of whiskey and hit me in the head with a tire iron. I don’t want to wake up until after this baby is out of me. I’m never doing this again without morphine.’”
    Willy laughed. “But your mother would agree that our baby is a rule waiting to be broken. In fact, Jimmy, I’d say . . .ohmygod—” She jerked up the soggy front of her peasant skirt, lay back among the ladyslippers, and yelled in pain. My handsome, earnest, barely grown dad, a rich-boy law student who had no idea how to argue with the law of Mother Nature, squatted between the flayed hem of her silk peasant skirt. “Willy?”
    “I’m serious!”
    He tore her panties off, held her knees apart, and thirty minutes later, he caught me in his hands. He and she laid me among the pink orchids. I was born in record time—early, alert, and hungry. They were stunned. And thrilled. Of course I can’t remember the moment, but I know I must have been pink and happy.
    Four years later, my mother died of a blood clot in her brain, her hand simply stopping on the half-finished canvas of a ladyslipper, a slip of pink color on the tip of her brush, her hand falling like an leaf into her lap, her body melting into a relaxed, abstract-dancer heap on a knoll looking down into Ladyslipper Lost. It was her favorite place to paint. I was four years old when she died, and I have only a blurry memory I have of watching her die, while I sat on a child-sized folding chair beside her with a coloring book frozen in my hands, screaming.
    When my father and G. Helen found us, several hours later, I was holding her hand.
    She left us dozens of ethereal paintings; my favorites are the soft, sexy, mystical ladyslippers. The unfinished ladyslipper painting hangs in a special room at the Downs. I visit it often. She also left behind a lullaby in honor of the orchids who watched me come into the world.
    Ladyslipper, ladyslipper
    What do you know?
    Destiny’s dancers, on their toes
    Pink shoes, green stage, pirouette in place
    All for the joy of charming Grace.
    G. Helen framed my mother’s handwritten copy of the poem and I kept it on the nightstand beside my bed, singing it to myself at night instead of a prayer. My other memories of Willy Osterman Bagshaw were submerged under bleak gray half-tones of horror, tangled with recollections of her death, and of my handsome, stalwart father crying, and my eventual realization that he would never be perfectly happy again, and neither would I. He never went back to the orchid glen. “The day you were born was the happiest day of your daddy’s life,” G.