Free Flannery by Brad Gooch Page A

her,” says her first cousin Frances Florencourt. Naming a pet quail “Amelia Earhart,” following the pilot’s disappearance over the Pacific in the summer of 1937, she startled a teacher and other girls on a field trip in nearby Nesbit Woods when she shouted, of her missing bird, “Oh, I’ve found Amelia Earhart! I’ve found Amelia Earhart!” Fellow Girl Scout Regina Sullivan has recalled one of her chickens with the middle name of her uncle Herbert Aloysius Cline, in Atlanta: “She would bring Aloysius to Scout meetings and he was dressed in little gray shorts, a little white shirt, a jacket, and a red bow. He just walked around us as we had our troop meeting.” As O’Connor explained in “The King of the Birds”: “I could sew in a fashion and I began to make clothes for chickens.”
    During the summers the Cline Mansion grew livelier with the annual visits of Aunt Agnes and her four daughters — distant models for the two visiting Catholic schoolgirl (second) cousins of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Agnes Cline had met her husband, Frank Florencourt, a signal designer for Central of Georgia Railroad, in Savannah, where she and Regina moved after high school. In 1924, the Florencourts even lived briefly with the O’Connors in their Charlton Street town house, before the birth of their first daughter. Having moved up North, near Boston, Agnes, who spoke with a Southern accent her entire life, brought her daughters to Georgia each summer for refreshment in their heritage. Greatly amplified for weeks at a time by these four girls — Margaret, Louise, Catherine, and Frances — the large Cline household sometimes included, as well, Cousins Betty and Peter Cline, from Atlanta, and Frank Cline, from Louisiana.
    “They played better,” remembers Peabody classmate Charlotte Conn Ferris, of the Florencourt girls. “Being in a family of four they knew better how to interact with other children.” Elizabeth Shreve Ryan recalls, “I was always interested in listening to them because we didn’t hear many Northern people speak. It was like listening to a foreign language.” Mary Flannery mostly sat on the porch with the two oldest sisters, while the littler ones played in the yard. “I think the times I saw her talk the most was when the cousins were visiting,” said Kitty Smith Kellam. “You didn’t hear her laugh very often except when they were there. They would sit on that porch and rock
all
day long and I used to think how horrible that would be — just watching the world go by and rocking.” Peter Cline says, “We had a running Monopoly game set up on the landing, and Mary Flannery was very much a part of it. She was a very sweet girl, very funny, with a keen wit.”
    While Edward O’Connor remained “the invisible man” to many children and young people in the neighborhood who never met him, he did visit during the summer. He would not have stayed away long from the daughter who was the single great joy and consolation in his life. “I remember sitting on the front porch at Greene Street in the middle of the day,” says Frances Florencourt. “They had a big dinner at noonday, and afterwards they would sit in these big white chairs on the front porch and slap mosquitoes and fan themselves. I was sitting in Edward O’Connor’s lap. He was playing that game, ‘I got your nose’ with me. I’d giggle. Then I said, ‘No, I’ve got your nose,’ and I pulled hard at his nose. I think I really must have really hurt him. He didn’t look at all sick at that time. Though I wonder how much a six- or seven-year-old could really perceive.”
    A regular summertime destination for all of these cousins was Sorrel Farm, later called Andalusia, the 550-acre working dairy farm owned by their uncle, Dr. Bernard Cline, from Atlanta, and named for the sorrel-colored horses he kept there. Off Eatonton Road, two miles outside town, the former Stovall Place plantation was their pastoral playground, complete