Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) (29 page)

Olive Ann adored her father and shared with him a sense of humor and a love of storytelling that led her to write the novel that changed her life. And she knew that there was nothing she couldn't share with her mother. With her talent for listening and for drawing people out, Olive Ann felt she had come to know and understand both of her parents even better than they knew each other. Their marriage shaped her, and in the end, it astonished her. Watching her father, sick himself, care for her mother during the last year of her life, Olive Ann felt a new respect for both of them, and for the amazing power of love. “And all the time there was Daddy,” Olive Ann wrote. “Always there at the hospital, bringing her cantaloupe, which she could eat, and wine, and making jokes that made her laugh. There were times, of course, in their life together when he had failed her, as she had him, but no woman ever felt more loved and secure and supported than she did when it mattered most. She said one day, ‘I couldn't have stood it if it hadn't been for all of you. I've felt as if the arms of God and everybody I love have been around me, holding me, and your daddy most of all.”

This was the story Olive Ann wanted to tell in
Time, Dirt, and Money,
and she worked hard on it because she was determined to do it justice. “I want to write this book because it can say something,” she wrote from the Hambidge Center. “I don't need any more fame or fortune than I have and have never craved it. But when I thought about
NOT
writing this book, I knew it would haunt me. I think I've been writing it all my life—Sanna and Will, I mean. I think it can say something to all these people who have problems or are mismatched and just give up and get divorces.”

***

Back in Atlanta in October, Olive Ann was still saying no to speaking invitations at least once a day; now, though, it was easier, because she was genuinely eager to keep writing. But she also wanted to make time to enjoy life, the great gift that had been handed back to her. She would work steadily, she decided, but not let herself feel guilty about taking time off for naps, for friends and family, or for the occasional
Cold Sassy Tree
appearance. Bookstores were already gearing up for Christmas. Olive Ann agreed to do a round of holiday autographings and publicity, and
Cold Sassy Tree
jumped right back onto the Atlanta best-seller list. This time, most of the people who appeared at her signing parties were already loyal fans, out buying more copies of their favorite book. Olive Ann wrote about meeting a mother and her fifteen-year-old son, who were buying two books as gifts. “We already own six,” the mother explained. “We lend them out.”

Over a year after publication,
Cold Sassy Tree
had taken on a life of its own. It seemed that publicity, or even appearances by Olive Ann herself, had little to do with it. The word simply traveled. Nearly everyone who read
Cold Sassy Tree
passed it on to someone else; teachers used it in their classrooms; ministers preached it from the pulpit. After selling the hardcover for a year, Faith Brunson reported that
Cold Sassy Tree
had sold more copies at Rich's than any other fiction except
Gone with the Wind,
which had a forty-five-year head start. The actress Faye Dunaway bought the movie rights to the novel, in January 1986, and announced her plans to play Miss Love in a film version. After the
Atlanta Journal
quoted Olive Ann's agent as saying that the deal had been in the six figures, the author reported that everyone in Atlanta now thought she was rich. She also began getting telephone calls from stage mothers wanting her to arrange auditions for their children.

Any notion Olive Ann may have had in the fall about sticking to a regular writing schedule became moot that winter, when she found herself seduced by a whole new batch of invitations. “Yesterday I got a call to teach at a writers' conference for a week on a horse farm in Kentucky, which I turned down,” she wrote to me in February, “and then an invitation to go to New York for lunch, which I accepted.” She couldn't imagine why the Georgia Department of Industry and Trade was willing to send a bunch of Southern writers all the way to Manhattan for lunch at the Russian Tea Room, but she couldn't pass up the opportunity. “I don't personally see how we are famous enough outside of Georgia to interest a bunch of Yankees, even if they're hungry,” she said, “unless they're just mad to hear Southern accents.” The tourism board would put them up for two days. Olive Ann conceded, “Now conscientious fiction writers would let it go at that and come on home and get to work. Being me, and like my father, I can't imagine not extending the trip, hoping that this time I will be in action instead of in bed....After being a hermit so many years, what with doctor's orders not to go anywhere and then really trying to finish the book, it's as if I'm starved to go places.”

That year, there were lots of places to go. She and Andy contemplated another trip to Europe, and they made plans to attend the American Booksellers Association convention in New Orleans in May. The paperback edition of
Cold Sassy Tree
was due out that summer, and the publisher, Dell, was launching it at the ABA with a special luncheon for booksellers. Olive Ann hadn't been to New Orleans since 1952, on a trip with her parents; this time, Andy would be her escort and she would be a guest of honor. “I'm sure you understand why, for me, going is more delightful with him than without him,” she wrote. “I am not a helpless female who can't carry my own bag or weight, but with him even a simple trip is sprinkled with starlight.”

Happy as she was visiting all of us in New York and being wined and dined by booksellers and publishers in New Orleans, these two trips were also sobering for Olive Ann; they made her realize that she didn't have the strength to do everything she wanted. She already had had to cancel a couple of appearances and talks that spring because of the mumps, of all things. (“But just on one side,” as Andy kept reminding her.) Mysterious fevers continued to come and go. And five days of bookstores, Broadway shows, galleries, and socializing in New York landed her in bed on the last day.

“I am finally facing the fact that I need an afternoon nap just as much in New York or New Orleans as at home,” she wrote me when she got back to Atlanta. “New York made me sick.” After a week of bed rest she felt better, but knew that a trip to Europe was out of the question. That summer,
Cold Sassy Tree
was once again climbing the best-seller lists—now as a paperback—and Olive Ann Burns was as much in demand as ever. A fifth-grade student wrote her a fan letter, after reading the book for school, and begged for a reply: “Please answer this letter. If you do, I'll get extra credit, and I need all the help I can get.” (“I answered the letter,” Olive Ann reported.) On Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, a huge
Cold Sassy Tree
billboard advised California drivers to “leave the fast lane for a country road.” Olive Ann was pleased that
Cold Sassy Tree
was suddenly being read by thousands more people, and she would have loved to be out and about, meeting some of her new fans, but in December she confessed that she didn't feel well enough to write
or
do publicity. It was one of the few times I ever heard her sound discouraged about her health.

***

Ever since she was first diagnosed with cancer Olive Ann had thought about one day writing a book called
How to Be Sick,
for people with terminal or chronic illness. Now she joked that she had been unwillingly gathering material for
How to Be Sick
all fall. “But,” she said, “it isn't meant to be for people with intestinal bugs, mumps, vertigo, bronchitis (my latest ailment), or too much New York or New Orleans.” Reading her letters, one might be tempted to accuse Olive Ann of being a hypochondriac; there was always something wrong. In the fall of 1986, she had run a fever every day for a month. Standing up made her dizzy, and two days of watching work progress on the mountain house had landed her in bed with bronchitis. She didn't complain; instead, she wrote about how much fun it had been to sit outside in a director's chair and watch as the backhoes and front-end loaders felled trees and dug trenches for the drain field and septic tank. Norma said that no matter how bad she felt, Olive Ann could find something to enjoy in every day, and that was certainly true.

The day after she wrote to me that she had not been feeling well enough to work, I received another letter, titled “Chapter II—Dec. 7, 1986.” It read, in part: “Now as for the sequel, I think circumstances are giving me a chance to make my fiction-writing career repeat itself. Five weeks ago I had a bone marrow biopsy that showed some evidence of lymphoma (the first time in eight years!), but it didn't seem worth mentioning since it might be months or years before chemo. But I've been running fever with the bronchitis that should have been long over. Trying to be sure of the situation, the doctor ordered a CAT scan that revealed a mass (probably of tumor-laden lymph nodes) at the back of the abdomen.” She was scheduled for a biopsy and surgery the week before Christmas, after which she was to undergo more chemotherapy and radiation. The day she got the news, Olive Ann said, she had been so busy cheering up relatives that the fact that her cancer had recurred didn't even sink in. But later she realized that she was scared. “I admitted this to Andy,” she wrote, “and I haven't felt scared since we talked about it. Hooray for an in-house therapist—one who can hold me.” But, in parentheses, she added, “He said he was a little scared, too.”

As one of their friends has observed, Olive Ann and Andy weren't cheerful just by nature; they were cheerful by policy. Certainly Olive Ann summoned all her resources in an effort to view this new development in a positive light. “I'm really not much dismayed or upset right now,” she wrote, perhaps trying to convince herself, too. “I've had lots of practice living one day at a time and accepting the unacceptable. This is one more adventure in living—another challenge—and what a difference to know for sure that I can deal with it. It has
not
been easy to deal with feeling bad most of the time.”

As usual, Olive Ann knew that what she needed from her friends was not sympathy but encouragement. And after all those years of living next door to Olive Ann, Norma Duncan knew that the best thing she could do for her now was urge her to get back to work on her book. After making Olive Ann promise not to die, Norma said to her, “Well, maybe we'll get another
Cold Sassy Tree
out of this.” Olive Ann had already had the same thought. “That is exactly my intention,” she wrote to me. “A few letters to do now, and Christmas presents to wrap and mail, and then I expect to get to work in earnest—before that biopsy next week. I really haven't felt like getting at anything lately, but I had
better
.” Ferrol Sams liked to tease Olive Ann by saying, “Some writers need to get drunk in order to work. Olive Ann Burns needs to get cancer.” She thought this was a wonderful joke; I suspect she also believed that there was a grain of truth in it.

Unfortunately, cancer was not much of a help this time around. Olive Ann was out of the hospital for Christmas but was back within days. “I felt what dying must feel like,” she wrote. As it turned out, she was severely anemic and dehydrated. But worst of all, her abdomen had swollen up so much after the surgery that, as she joked in one letter, “it looked as if the surgeon did a caesarean and put the baby back in.” She was in the hospital for almost two months, sicker than ever before, and it was then, I think, that I realized that she was not indomitable after all. Always before she had done such a good job of coping with illness that I had come to see it as just another part of her life, something she accepted with good humor, but not something to worry about. Even now, she was referring to the hospital as her “health spa,” so extended was her stay turning out to be.

She didn't come home until March. “I had chemo on Tuesday,” she wrote, “a bigger dose than before, but as Andy pointed out, only the cat threw up that night.” She believed that she could beat lymphoma again as she had beat it before, so she set about choosing appliances, carpets, and cabinets for the mountain cabin. They were calling it the Write House in honor of all the writing that she and Andy intended to do there. Reading through Olive Ann's letters from the spring of 1987 is in itself a lesson in living in the moment, for they are an odd juxtaposition of alarming health bulletins and lovely plans for the future. At the end of March, Andy had an enlarged lymph gland removed from his neck; it proved to be malignant. Now he and Olive Ann were both receiving chemotherapy, alternating treatments so that one of them would be well enough to cook and keep house while the other was sick from chemo.

Olive Ann described one night when Andy began throwing up and didn't stop until four-thirty the next afternoon, at which point the Prednisone he was taking kicked in and produced such a high that he couldn't sit down. “He tackled every project in the house and garden, both here and at the mountain house, and without sleep,” Olive Ann wrote. “By the time he finished the pills on Sunday he was getting a little tired but had had a good time. At one point I was afraid we'd give out of work to do and I'd have to hire him out.” Olive Ann herself was in and out of the hospital for blood transfusions and was confined to the house after each round of chemo until her white blood cell count rose to an acceptable level. Hearing all of this, I began to fear that if I didn't make a trip to Atlanta soon, I might not get another chance to see either Olive Ann or Andy. Even though her letters were upbeat—she wrote about meeting a fan who had bought forty hardcover copies of
Cold Sassy Tree,
about Dell's seventh printing of the paperback, about her cozy writing loft in the Write House—I also sensed a precariousness, as if either one of them might be snatched away at any moment.