New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2018. 242 pages. $27.99.
Mary Carter Bishop’s debut memoir, Don’t You Ever: My Mother and Her Secret Son, opens with the author sitting next to her half-brother Ronnie’s body in the funeral home. She pulls out her reporter’s pad and begins writing an obituary she knows he wouldn’t want. In it she includes the truth of his life: that he is survived by a mother and a sister, even though he’d spent most of his life alone, between foster homes, an orphanage, and a mental hospital where he received electric-shock treatments. Ronnie’s death in 1991 came just three years after Bishop found him, and a decade after Bishop learned, upon applying for a passport, that she had a brother at all.
“I was a prize-winning journalist,” Bishop writes, “a professional observer of the human condition, but I had missed the most significant fact of my life, a secret hiding in plain sight.”
Bishop chronicles her family’s history with a reporter’s dutiful attention to facts and her own poetic gift for painfully and precisely rendered characterizations. With her “nervous, chicken-blinking blue eyes,” Bishop’s mother Adria lived in fear of some disaster she imagined was always just over the horizon. Bishop’s father Early was playful, inventive, and warm—a purveyor of horses and cattle, dandelions, honeysuckle, and wild violets. Through him, Bishop learned that “there are no truly ordinary people or places, not anywhere, not ever. If you listen closely enough, if you watch carefully enough, you can be astonished by every square foot of this earth.”
What her parents seemed to share was a profound shame that turned their household into “a year-round festival of self-contempt.” As they criticized each other and themselves for small slights and retreated into their own private wounds, Bishop writes, “the love between them flickered like a dying porch light.” Of course, Bishop would ultimately discover that her parents also held in common the secret of Adria’s first son, Ronnie, conceived when she was a teenager in an encounter Bishop saw as rape but her mother saw as her own fault, a mistake, and a source of constant shame that would follow her the rest of her life.
Bishop’s hometown of Keswick, Virginia is a character in its own right, with its massive estates and “velvety, unspoiled hills.” In Keswick, Adria and Early lived in tenant housing and worked as a nursemaid and farmhand in an estate called Bridlespur. Extreme poverty and extreme wealth lived side-by-side in Keswick, Bishops writes, “with few people in between.” The schools Bishop attended still had outhouses and woodstoves, while nearby heirs and heiresses recreated “British nobility in miniature,” holding fox hunts, trumpets and all. Inside those sprawling estates, nobody held jobs and everybody slept in late, while all around them hummed the every-day, backbreaking work of people like Bishop’s parents, who struggled to keep their employers’ genteel dreams from fraying at the edges.
When Bishop discovers Ronnie cutting hair in a barbershop one town over from her own, she begins to sense the lopsided math of their relationship—every gain she made was his loss. Bishop struggles to reconcile the generous, loving mother she knew with the mother Ronnie describes: a woman who left him in a blazing hot car during church rather than be seen with him, who had him sleep in the barn rather than the house, and who instructed him never to call her mama.
Rather than claim her ignorance as innocence, Bishop implicates herself in her brother’s abandonment. When Ronnie becomes ill and doctors discover his lanky appearance and still-growing feet, hands, and jaw bones are caused by a rare disorder, Bishop senses a chance to make up for the past: “Heroic notions swirled in my brain . . . I was going to save him. I would compensate for my childless years and become the mother he never had.”
In her earlier work as a journalist, Bishop worked on the reporting team at the Philadelphia Inquirer that received a Pulitzer for their coverage of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, and she won a George Polk Award in Environmental reporting for her coverage of illegal pesticide use in Virginia. Bishop investigated the public school system in Philadelphia, chronicled the legacy of urban renewal in Roanoke, and spent years writing about forced sterilization in Virginia—a chapter of history that veered close to home for Bishop, as she considered how easily her mother could have been one of the unwed mothers rounded up and sterilized against their will. “She fit the formula: poor, unmarried country girl with an illegitimate baby. If she’d been targeted, I wouldn’t be writing this.”
One of the joys of this book lies in watching Bishop—in her seventies now—turn her finely honed attention and relentless questioning inward, piecing together the scattered artifacts of her own life. We catch glimpses of Bishop standing in the remains of her mother’s childhood home, sorting through the stack of letters her brother kept in his pocket; rushing to the waiting room in the hospital to write down everything her brother has told her; attending Ronnie’s school reunions after his death; and emailing the descendant of a man she thought might be Ronnie’s father.
We can sense her work along the edges, sitting hunched over her computer, hitting refresh, waiting for the response to arrive, carrying the final piece of information she needs to put the story together—or not. When the picture arrives in her inbox, it’s another disappointment: the man looks nothing like Ronnie. When Bishop shows up at her mother’s childhood home, only the chimneys remain, sticking up from the charred foundation like headstones. Some questions, she finds, can’t be answered—not fully—but are instead absorbed into the tumult, the wild surprise and tragedy of each ordinary life.
