Free Flannery by Brad Gooch Page B

with white farmhouse, cow barn, horse stables, milk shed, fishing ponds, and fields for riding. One of Dr. Cline’s hobbies was raising prizewinning show horses, including Rocky Barrymore and Jim Dandy, a Tennessee walker. “To this day I have bowlegs and I think it was from riding horses all over that farm when I was seven,” says Jack Tarleton. The girl cousins, dressed alike in brown jodhpurs, pale yellow shirts, and shiny brown boots, rode Shetland ponies they named Shirley Temple, Devonshire Duke, Lady Luck, or Brownie. A snippet of home-movie color footage exists of Mary Flannery, in jodhpurs as well, looking quite assured in the saddle.
    Yet she never simply became one of the gang of girls. She often held back, or acted in an off-putting manner. She would give inexperienced riders “wild horses” and then “laugh if you fell off,” complained Loretta Feuger Hoynes, a childhood friend from Savannah. Like the three little bullies in “The River,” she got a kick out of luring unsuspecting victims into a pigpen. Lucia Bonn Corse remembered being a guest at a summer party given for the Florencourt cousins during which “Mary Flannery spent the evening in a corner by herself.” One Milledgeville resident has recalled that her own mother once invited the visiting Florencourt cousins to enjoy a fresh harvest of black cherries. While the girls were off riding horses, Mary Flannery, an “obligatory” guest, sat unhappily on the back porch spitting out cherry pits while muttering, “I didn’t want to come.”
    E DWARD O’C ONNOR DID eventually secure a short-term home for his family on the outskirts of Atlanta in the Peachtree Heights neighborhood of Buckhead, still a small town of ten thousand residents, with upscale housing developments interspersed among its wooded areas. The rental at 2525 Potomac Avenue, quite a change from the Cline Mansion, was a one-story brown-frame foursquare, built in 1920. Like most of the homes in the planned “garden suburb” of curved streets, lush landscaping, and mature willow trees, the square bungalow fit a type of quintessential American construction provided by mail-order companies such as Aladdin and Sears, Roebuck, including complete plans and materials, and money-back offers of a dollar for each knot found in the lumber. In choosing the modest home on hilly ground, Ed O’Connor would have been aware of an appealing feature for his daughter: its porch fronted over the duck pond of the community park.
    By moving to Buckhead, the O’Connors were also moving closer to other members of the Cline and O’Connor clans. Just a mile and a half away in Peachtree Park, another suburban development from the twenties, lived Regina’s brother, the real estate agent Herbert Aloysius Cline, his wife, Edward O’Connor’s sister Nan, and their two children, Peter and Betty, the regular summertime visitors to Milledgeville. Also in Peachtree Park, three blocks south of the Clines, was John Tarleton, an auditor at a building supply company, married to Regina’s sister Helen Cleo Cline, and their horseback-riding son, Jack. Of the divvying up of this matriarchal world, O’Connor later explained to a friend that her mother had three main sisters, “Miss Mary, Miss Cleo, and Miss Agnes. Miss Cleo’s domain is Atlanta and Miss Agnes’ Boston.”
    All three families attended the same church, and sent their children to the same public school. Although Regina and her sister Cleo had a testy relationship, Jack Tarleton recalls that “My mother and I went once or twice to the O’Connors’ house on Potomac Avenue to see them, or to pick them up.” He remembers a party at the time at the Tarleton home at 3061 Piedmont Road: “Flannery was there, and the Florencourt cousins. They were all dressed in hoop skirts. Sometime during the afternoon, Flannery got caught outside on the porch and couldn’t get in. So she simply went through the little window, hoop skirt and all. I was a little