Flannery by Brad Gooch Page A

head.”
    Bernard and Louis lived together at Bell House, Atlanta’s elite boardinghouse for confirmed bachelors and a few widowers. Housed in a Victorian mansion, with four Tiffany stained-glass windows, on the northeast corner of Peachtree and Third streets, Bell House required that residents be recommended by three members in good standing. The house rules were no drinking; coats worn downstairs and on the veranda; no smoking in the dining room. In exchange, the men were well attended by a staff of cooks, waiters, and housekeepers. As Elinor Hiller wrote in the
Atlanta Journal Magazine
in 1929, “Being an ex–Bell House boy is something like Roman citizenship, a thing to be proud of, a thing with just a touch of distinction in it.” Of visits to his uncles, Jack Tarleton recalls, with less mythology, “Bell House was musty, with high ceilings, leather furniture, and big magnolia trees out front. It was a fancy men’s club that had begun to age a bit.”
    Dr. Bernard Cline was quite the gentleman-about-town. His social portfolio included not only Bell House, but also the Piedmont Driving Club, boasting the city’s first golf course, and the Capital City Club. Both of these exclusive clubs were “restricted” to the wealthiest of Atlanta’s white society — meaning, closed to Jews and blacks. Even before moving to Atlanta, Mary Flannery and her Florencourt cousins were accustomed to fetes in their honor at the Piedmont Club, or on the front lawn of Bell House, where the main event featured black men in white coats driving up in ice cream trucks full of fancy desserts. The
Atlanta Journal
covered one of Uncle Bernard’s “old-fashioned” lawn parties for eighty-five guests at Bell House, under the heading “Dr. Cline Hosts Affair Feting Nieces”: the girls pinned the tail on Mickey Mouse, and released colorful balloons into the air.
    Yet for the fourteen-year-old Mary Flannery, Atlanta was less a lawn party than a perfect storm of yet only dimly understood troubles. Even as an adult, she held on to a juvenile animus for the place. “My idea about Atlanta,” she wrote Ted Spivey, “is to get in, get it over with and get out before dark.” The sources of these negative feelings were her experiences in 1939 and 1940. During that unsettled period, her father was ill, even if temporarily asymptomatic. Every weekday he would put on a jacket and tie and travel downtown to the FHA offices on the fifth floor of the Austell Building at 10 Forsyth Street, working at one of Roosevelt’s many “alphabet agencies” to help ease the city’s housing crisis. As adjustment to the city was proving difficult for the family, his daughter would spend these same hours, ill at ease, in the corridors of her modern high school.
    Given the extra stress, tensions between Regina Cline and the O’Connor family resurfaced. “Regina and my mother did not see eye to eye at all,” reports Dr. Peter Cline of relations between Regina and her sister-in-law Nan, at whose wedding she met her husband. “All the other in-laws called my Grandmother and Grandfather O’Connor, ‘Mother’ and ‘Father.’ Regina never called them anything except ‘Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor.’ That gives a little clue as to what she was like. . . . Edward O’Connor was a sweet, charming man. He was tall, good-looking, very warm, the total opposite of his wife. The O’Connors were warm, loving people, very loving, very outgoing.” As O’Connor herself later summed up these dynamics, especially on the Cline side, “I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”
    The Atlanta that O’Connor knew, growing up in the thirties, suffered even more than most cities from the poverty and distress caused by the Great Depression. The South had already experienced an economic turnaround brought about by the destruction of King Cotton by the boll weevil,