Bearing Witness

Page 4 American Book Review Bearing Witness DeWitt Henry Melissa J. Delbridge’s lively vernacular writing has some affinity with Mary Karr’s The Liars’Club (1995). Her humor masks her pain. It also masks her hard-won self-assertion, her tenacity as a victim of an abusive stepfather, and later as a lover of women, and her passionate advocacy for institutionalized, mentally ill girls. Her father is a charmer and a storyteller, whose own voice is lovingly dramatized. If the South she depicts—vintage 1970s Tuscaloosa,Alabama—isn’t “too ugly not to love” (as Karr’s father describes Leechfield, Texas), it is nonetheless “a simmering stew of religion, race, sex, and corruption.” Melissa, like Karr, is a tomboy under her father ’s tutelage. “I could shoot a deer and knew how to field dress it if there was someone to help me with the heavy parts.” Before their divorce when she was twelve, Melissa saw her parents as ardent, but her father’s hunting trips became an excuse for adulterous “gallivanting,” and finally her mother moved her and her daughter to a tiny rented house. “Dad had more charm than the law should allow.” When her father tells Delbridge about the divorce, in “Gun and Bait,” Melissa still adores him. “Count on his love, I learned, but never his presence.” He will be her guardian spirit for life: “Look for him in every man who catches your eye. They lack that smile so the pull can’t hold.Your eye starts to wander before too long.” Meanwhile, after the divorce, her mother feels cheated by life. She struggles to keep up appearances despite their unaccustomed poverty, and before long she marries a man who forces a “slug of tongue down my twelve-year-old throat.” Writing about this thirty-seven years later, Delbridge the memoirist keeps to measured understatement (again one thinks of Karr’s abusive babysitter ), even though Melissa is passing from childhood innocence to conflicts that threaten her very sanity. In another splendid section, “Company We Keep,” Melissa makes two friends in school, each of whom defies conventions. There is Kirby, smart and rich, with whom Melissa shares the secret pleasures of hiding in his older sister’s mirrored closet and dressing up in lace and silk, “fragile and forbidden.” As this friendship wanes, Melissa bonds with the girl Jinkie, whose dad is an alcoholic, and who offers a kind of rhyming adventure in forbidden costuming. This time it is a KKK robe in her attic, which Jinkie drapes over Melissa’s shoulders. When Jinkie and Melissa at fifteen sneak into the university pool together at night and Jinkie confronts a custodian who spies on them, the incident helps Melissa find the courage to tell off her stepfather : “You leave me the fuck alone!” In twelfth grade now, she moves out and gets a job, while Jinkie leaves town, gets involved with a motorcycle gang, works in a strip club, and eventually marries a killer. After college, the twenty-two-year-old Melissa runs into Kirby in a Tuscaloosa restaurant. He is visiting from Bryn Mawr, where he teaches, and has just had breakfast with “some friends from the classics department here.” In 1993, Melissa’s mother sent her a clipping of Kirby’s obituary. He had died ofAIDS. In 2004, the memoirist Delbridge, now a librarian, is speaking with a classics professor at Duke and asks if he’s ever heard of Kirby Ellis. She learns that the Duke professor’s current partner, Luther, had known Kirby at Bryn Mawr, and had cared for Kirby as he died. When the professor had met Luther, “he still cried over Kirby’s death.” Delbridge clearly identifies with those treated as insane and as “other.” Delbridge now envisions Kirby being cared for: “only it’s a little boy I see, a good little boy waiting for somebody to tuck him in.” Similarly, when after thirty years of silence, Delbridge hears from Jinkie’s sister that Jinkie had died in a 1997 car accident, she’s not surprised. “Hers would never be a peacefullyin -her-sleep sort of death.” In time present, she tells another friend “about my Jinkie...