MOTHER’S DAY TRIBUTE
57
told herself when she was a child
that she must have been adopted
or kidnapped by the McKewns.
Surely, she couldn’t have been
a member of their family. They
were so different from her, she
told me. I began to wonder about
thorns in the rosebushes of our
perfect garden, but my probing
questions elicited few details and
no clear explanations.
Over the years we talked so
many times about family history,
about her recollections. I
thought she had told me practically
everything she could remember,
but less than two years
before her death she surprised
me with some new revelations
about her father. When she was
about 14, she and her family
moved into my grandfather’s
neighborhood in Tampa. Their
new house was two doors down
from his. For most of her life,
her future mother-in-law, Alice
Lewis Crary, was her nemesis.
They couldn’t stand each other.
Every now and then, Talley
would mention that Alice felt
superior to the McKewns.
“How could she have possibly
looked down on the
McKewns?” I asked.
“Well,” my grandmother
said with a sigh of resignation.
“My father was a gambler. He
played cards all the time, and
sometimes he wouldn’t come
home. And we’d worry that he
might have lost his paycheck
again. And how would we eat?
Well, he won that last house we
lived in. He won it in a game
of cards. The man who lost the
house, well, his son lived there.
And Daddy evicted him with a
crowbar. We were sitting in the
car, and Mother screamed, ‘My
God, don’t kill him!’ And we
thought Daddy was going to
kill him, but he moved out, and
we moved in.”
With such a violent stir, it’s
no wonder the neighbors had
a bad impression of the new
Irish family on the block. The
incident also sheds some light
on many of those questions I always
had about why Talley said
she wanted to run away from
reality when she was a little girl. >>
Talley and Evans enjoyed a lifelong romance.
May 26 - September 16
HOLMES GALLERY
In Autumn Dance © Kamil Nureev
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