The Callans and McClarys, by John Edward Callan - Callanworld

The Callans and McClarys
books). On the other hand, her
taste in clothes was embarrassing.
Her favorite color was yellow,
and I can still remember a
horrible pullover shirt she
bought me at a time when no
white boy wore yellow. As a
teenager, I picked up a shiny
gold bowling shirt with the name
of the team still visible in an
attempt to parody her taste.
Either that was impossible or she
has a sense of humor, for she
professed to think it perfectly
lovely.
She was the fastest typist I
have ever seen and preferred a
large manual which she could
batter without its moving. Once
she came to Lawrence, where I
was a graduate student at the
University of Kansas, to visit and
Grandma Davis and sweet
Little Mary Beth (Nancy’s
mother) in late 1944 or
early 1945.
type some term
papers for me, and
at every new line
would slap my little
portable halfway
across the table. She
was an excellent
speller, claiming to
have been marked
wrong only once in
her schooling,
unjustly, for putting
4 loops on an “m.”
She was also
good, if somewhat
dogmatic, at grammar,
insisting that I
could not begin a
sentence with a conjunction. She
could also write clearly and
correctly, and once, when I was
in default on an essay on the
Jesuits in North American (I
think) for a high school contest,
(she)theoretically edited but in
fact pretty much wrote it for me.
She loved music and played
the piano vigorously, though I
could not judge and cannot
remember how well. We did not
have a piano until someone
loaned it to us rather than store it
some time late in or just after
World War II. She wanted her
children to learn but did not
insist, and as far as I know, I was
the only one to take formal
music lessons (on the trombone,
on which Dad had got a good
deal, rather than the tenor
~ 92 ~
saxophone I wanted), though all
three of us have good voices—
better than she, I think. She was
apparently a very good bridge
player, but my brother John
would be a better judge of this
because that was this was the
only family vice I never acquired.
She was practically an
omnivorous and certainly a
voracious reader, like her father
and eldest child. She belonged to
the Book of the Month Club, or
one of the smaller ones, and
bought a number of historical
and other novels with soft-core
sex scenes which as an adolescent
I hunted up (I remember
The Stumpet Wind/ The
Queen’s Physician, and something
about a pirate who rescues
hTs” lover from a harem) and
read surreptitiously. She also
frequented the library, at first
housed in the northeast corner
of the Cooper County Court
House, across from the men’s
room with the floor-length
urinals big enough, when I first
went there, for me to fall into.
There was an elderly woman—
Mrs. Fredericks? That was the
name of the hotel across High
Street—in charge, and a much
younger woman—she must have
been quite young then, Jessie
Dedrick, who never got a college
education or a husband but who
inherited the library and ran it
until her death. Mom was obviously
one of their major patrons,
and between the two of us we
must have increased their circulation
figures considerably. She
never tried to censor my reading
or, after an abortive tempt ot get
me to read David Copperfield,
guide it. Once, after I had read
Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of
Hecate County, I tried to dissuade
her from reading what
seemsed to me a pornographic
book. It was certainly explicit for
its time and place.
“She would have loved
further education, and I suspect
that one of the sources of strain
between her and Barbara
Hillyer, whom I married in
1958, was that Barbara got the
education which time and
circumstance denied her. In
addition, she probably thought
that Barbara reinforced what to
her were the less attractive sides
of my character. Besides, I came
to rely on Barbara and not on
her. In any case, they never got
on well, though from my point of
view I thought Barbara behaved
more civilly.
“Mom did not seem to be
afraid of much except, occasionally
and unpredictably, public
opinion, and then largely on my
account. She was certainly not,
though a communicant at Saints
Peter and Paul Church, awed by
priests or by the nuns who ran
the parochial grade and high
school. I don’t know whether she
was indifferent to vocations or
whether she knew me too well,
but she never encouraged me to
become a priest as mothers were
supposed to do. But then her
father was a fairly militant atheist,
and my sister Beth has a theory
that Mom remained a Catholic
(the only respect in which she