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1
Skeeter Davis, Noël Coward, and Eudora Welty
    â€œ Fuck,” said Frank Hains. “ I knew I shouldn’t have given that last bourbon to Eudora.”
    It had taken me almost a decade after that day of my mother’s funeral, but I had finally found the only equivalent that Mississippi offered to a
What’s My Line?
life. Frank—a John Daly-like presence in Jackson—was the arts editor of the state’s afternoon newspaper, for which he also wrote a column called “On Stage.” Eudora was writer Eudora Welty. We were at a cast party for New Stage Theatre’s latest production,
Long Day’s Journey into Night,
starring Geraldine Fitzgerald as Mary Tyrone. Frank and Miss Welty were active members of New Stage, and he was playing host that night at Bleak House, the name given facetiously to his antebellum home by the local literati of Jackson. The Dickensian nickname derived from the house’s outwardappearance of haunted dilapidation where it sat, rather spookily, on a hill opposite Jackson’s lone Jewish cemetery. Inside, however, past the vast front porch, Frank—also a gifted set designer—had redone his home with a lovely simplicity. Books abounded. A collection of vintage LPs filled one whole room, alphabetized and all of them encased in brown paper sleeves. Even though he had this wide selection of music, he usually only played Mabel Mercer, his favorite, or Erik Satie or Blossom Dearie. He also liked Fred Astaire—for his voice, not his dancing—which was so like Frank; he was always looking for the different angle, the way to appreciate an artist or a piece of art in his own way so that appreciation itself became a kind of art form. There was even a Leontyne Price album of pop songs arranged by Andre Previn he loved to listen to for some rueful smiles; especially the Mississippi diva’s rendition of “Melancholy Baby” with Previn on the piano and Ray Brown on bass. On the night of that latest cast party he was playing, as a tribute, a lot of Noël Coward, who had died the month before.
    Frank Hains went to New York City several times a year to review theater and opera for his newspaper and had begun to allow me to stay at Bleak House in his absence. He also subscribed to
After Dark
magazine, and I would peruse the pages of the slender and sleekly photographed issues when I visited him for their overt appeal to the kind of eroticism I had begun to seek out anyplace I could find it. Frank would stand over my shoulder when a new
After Dark
arrived in the mail and point out his latest favorite photograph by Roy Blakey or Kenn Duncan and regale me with stories about Angela Lansbury, who was often featured in the pages, or Rudolf Nureyev, whom he insisted I resembled in some sort of Slavic/Southern sleight-of-hand. “I should be more supportive of the ballet,” he said once, staring at the latest photo of Nureyev that
After Dark
was running. “I’m much more at home in literature and drama and musical comedy and opera. Satie is just about the only thing I can stomachthat doesn’t have a lyric. That, and Bach, but there’s a mathematical genius to old J. B. I find fascinating. I once had a crush on a mathematician when I was, like you, a college sophomore. I know—can you picture me a sophomore? Hmmm . . . why Bach and Satie?
There’s a column in there somewhere”
he said, using one of his favorite phrases as he pushed his black-framed reading glasses atop his thin-haired head, a habit of his when a concept for a column occurred to him, as if he were helping his brain to see the idea floating about his skull back there around his bald spot.
    Frank’s kitchen in Bleak House was as big as most homes. Theatrical posters—along with several of the photographs that Miss Welty had taken of innately elegant dirt-poor Mississippians when she worked as a publicist for the Works Project Administration