The three lives of Betty Lanier

My mother-in-law finds justice after death

There's this scene last week where, groping toward the bathroom near dawn, I walked into Betty's collection of porcelain thimbles. St. Kitts, Cartagena, and forty other countries and cities cascaded to the hardwood hallway. Keeping my arm against the wall to save some of them created a staccato effect, something like a storm's bout of hail against a window. Six thimbles broke. The wooden display rack fell from the wall, too.

Victoria, awakened, called out from the bedroom, "Put them on the kitchen counter."

A second scene, a day or two later, but this time it's Victoria. I heard her scream from the other side of the house. One of our new mobile clothes racks, a flimsy version of the type hotels keep for guests in their lobby foyers, had tipped over. I found Victoria pinned between the rack's thirty jackets and over fifty pairs of pants hanging from one of the walk-in closet's shelves.

Together, we righted the rack, and Victoria continued sorting Betty's clothes.

Well, said Betty. Well is a fine Southernism—an amused, bemused catch-all. Victoria and I try to help you with Well:

Victoria and I moved into Betty's modest house in south-central Tennessee four weeks ago. We don't know how long we'll be here. Victoria is Betty's only child, and closing Betty's estate may take some time. In the process, we've been sorting through Betty's photos and papers and souvenirs and, of course, talking a lot about Betty. This process honors our need for grief, and we're grateful we can do it.

Our sorting through Betty's belongings reminds me of the team that inventories Charles Foster Kane's stuff at the end of Citizen Kane. Betty didn't have anything close to what Kane has—the newsreel scene, quite plausibly, calls Kane's holdings "the loot of the world"—but we found more than forty pairs of shoes.

And a hundred to 200 sweaters, many of them with their store tags still hanging from them.

What accounts for Betty's clothes?

Orson Wells's movie famously provides a movie-long flashback to explain Kane and his loot. But I find John Berger's novella "The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol" a better framework for Betty's sartorial history because, with its magical realism, "Three Lives" looks both backward and forward. The novella also sets Lucie's life and her hidden treasures, from my way of reading it, in the context of resurrection and political hope.

Nashville: Betty's first life

Betty began her first life when Granny went up to see her siblings in Michigan. While Granny was away, Betty came home from school and told Hughes about a recruiter’s visit from the Nashville business school. Hughes signed Betty up.

Granny returned to a fait accompli and didn't speak to Hughes for days. It's the only disharmony between her parents that Betty ever divulged to us. She told us about it in her second life and after Granny had died.

After things settled down with her parents, Betty left the farm. She got on a Greyhound and, at first, stayed at a Nashville boardinghouse. She eventually moved into the girls' home. On our first trip to Betty’s house after she died, we found photos of her and her fellow residents having fun. The carefree life these photos suggested was a revelation to us.

Above: Betty (in checkered skirt) with friends

Betty would stay in Nashville for forty-eight years. After she completed business school, she became a keypunch operator. Then she got married, left the workforce, had Victoria, watched her marriage dissolve, and went back to work, this time as a computer programmer to make ends meet and later to help put Victoria through college and grad school.

When Victoria was growing up, Betty created a lot of her and Victoria's clothes. Victoria recalls trips to the fabric store and her mom using patterns to sew clothes for her—and for her friends and her dolls, too.

During that entire half century, Betty would return to the farm every weekend or two. At first, she came on a Greyhound. By the time Victoria was born and Hughes died, though, Betty usually took her car. She and Victoria would attend church with Granny, and the three of them prepared a huge Sunday dinner for themselves and, often, for some uncles and cousins before heading back to Nashville.

After Victoria moved to Virginia, Betty kept programming and eventually became a programer analyst.

When we would visit Nashville, or when Betty and Granny would visit us in Virginia, Victoria and they would clothes shop. They’d take Bethany along, of course. In the early years, they'd push Bethany in a stroller; in later years, they'd push Granny in a wheelchair. Each trip, Betty bought nice things for herself, her daughter, and her granddaughter.

Betty's house in Nashville’s Antioch neighborhood was small. When Victoria and I and our two children would visit Betty, the five of us would sort of timeshare her single bathroom. The house’s closets were small, too. Betty's bedroom closet had a smaller footprint than the house's standard-sized bathtub.

As her first life progressed, Betty started taking bus trips with friends and fellow church members to Gatlinburg, Tallahassee, and other day and overnight destinations. From what we can tell from her many travel photos—and despite her small closet—she never seemed to wear the same outfit twice.

Above: Granny and Betty preparing a big meal

Columbia: Betty's second life

In the summer and fall of 2008, Betty quit working and moved into a new house in Columbia, Tennessee, the house we're staying in now. Betty came to Columbia to be closer to Granny, who was still living on the farm in nearby Hampshire by herself but was growing more frail with age. Granny's farm is fifteen minutes from Betty's house. Within a week of closing on the house, Betty married her longtime boyfriend Billy, and they both moved in. So Betty retired, relocated, and married pretty much all at once.

Betty’s life kept changing fast. Granny and Billy died within four years of Betty’s move. Betty was alone again. When we'd visit, we'd go with her to the graveyards and stood with her as she freshened up the flowers.

Clockwise from upper-left: Betty, Granny, Victoria, and Bethany — four generations

But Betty loved Columbia. Victoria and I think that, ironically, Betty's new proximity to the farm finally liberated her from it. She kind of went wild here. She bought a new, red Camry, something she feared her circle would think extravagant and a little showy. But Victoria and I cheered her on.

Her earlier bus tours evolved into cruises to places like Panama and the Mediterranean. Betty once filled in for Bethany's boyfriend on a cruise after Bethany and he broke up. Their Caribbean cruise was probably Betty's favorite trip.

Above: Bethany and Betty (granddaughter and grandmother) on their Caribbean cruise

It was during her second life that Betty's wardrobe mushroomed. The master bedroom in Columbia, implausibly, has three walk-in closets. With Billy gone, Betty filled them all with new clothes. Then, about five years ago, Victoria talked Betty into selling a lot of her clothes in a yard sale. When we came this past February after Betty died, though, Betty had more clothes than ever.

We found around 200 to 300 pairs of pants to match those one hundred to 200 sweaters. Along with around twenty pairs of shoes she’d worn at least once, Betty had around twenty pairs of shoes that she had never worn, most of which, Victoria thinks, cost at least $100 before sales or before Betty would apply her coupons. Here’s Victoria’s accounting:

Betty was fifty when I met her, she was eighty-three when she died, and her clothes size never changed. She loved food and especially dessert, but she was a model of portion control. She was an extra small, and even then she'd tuck some of the waists in. When Betty's sister-in-law and a friend tried on some of the dresses and skirts the other day, Victoria told them to let out the waists. She also warned them about the pins.

We think Betty’s time in Columbia was the happiest time of her life, even happier than her time at the girls’ home. She loved the company of her brother and sister-in-law, who lived nearby, and she made lots of friends here. She joined the Clothes Closet ministry at her new church. She was an expert at sorting the donations as they'd come in.

When I eulogized Betty at her funeral, I talked about her work at the Clothes Closet. But I didn't mention the three walk-in closets. I hadn't sorted that out yet. Besides, Betty was just getting started.

The hidden public lives of Lucie and Betty

Lucie Cabrol is born in a peasant village in September 1900, exactly forty years to the month before Betty. Lucie is dwarf-sized and, as a teen and then as an adult, is often mistaken for a child. She is earthy, even by French peasant standards; she is wild and frank. In childhood, she earns the nickname “Cocadrille,” a mythical creature hatched in a dung heap that maintains an adversarial relationship with everyone, and the nickname stuck.

Lucie owns next to nothing during her first life, which she spends farming the family land. She earns a lot during her second life, though, when she lives alone in a broken-down chalet. She collects mushrooms and flowers in the forest and sells them in the city. Her second life ends when someone plants an ax in her head and steals the hidden fortune she has slowly amassed. We never find out who kills her.

She begins to find justice during her third life, though, which starts after her funeral. She would have no need to farm or to hide a fortune because “the dead own everything.”¹ In her first two lives, no one wants to marry her, but in her third life, she has several husbands among the dead villagers.

The next husband might be our first-person narrator, if he dies fast enough. When the narrator and Lucie are twenty, they make love twice. When they are both in their late sixties, the narrator returns to the village after an ultimately meaningless life in Argentina and Montreal, and he is considering marrying Lucie just before she is murdered.

After Lucie’s funeral, the narrator begins to hear Lucie again and eventually to see her as well.

She leads him to her father and the others. The village dead—those who died violently, anyway—are building a large chalet for Lucie and perhaps for the narrator, too. Some of the village living also show up to help the dead do justice for Lucie.

Berger's depiction of the afterlife is, to me, in important ways more biblical than what I've heard in church. In the novella's world of magical realism, the dead don't stay in heaven. Instead, they are resurrected. Like the resurrected Jesus, the dead characters appear and disappear when it suits them, and if they’d care to, they show the scars that marked them in life.

Lucie can appear as she did at sixty-seven just before her death or as she did at twenty when she and the narrator made love. Similarly, Jesus could be announced as the Lion and then appear as a Lamb.²

Lucie’s father Marius helps the narrator process Lucie’s appearances:

The Cocadrille could be seventeen, tall, with wide hips and with breasts you couldn’t take your eyes off—only then you wouldn’t know her, would you?³

Most importantly, Berger's characters return to earth for justice, which comports with the Bible's eschatology of resurrection and new creation.

Something like a confrontation between the popular and the biblical view of the afterlife develops between the narrator and Lucie as they watch the men build the chalet:

I was always told the dead rest after a lifetime’s work, I muttered.

When they remember their past, they work, she said. What else should they remember?⁴

This memory of injustice is the focus of new creation’s work. Lucie's father explains how the dead bring justice to earth:

We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.⁵

During Betty’s second life, after helping her mother and her husband through terminal illnesses, nothing forced her to remain who she was. She was alone, and she was free to express her public life in the form of new dresses, pants, sweaters, and shoes. But that public life had to be private. Victoria explains:

To me, Betty's three walk-in closets suggest her longing for public life. Betty, I’m sure, wouldn’t have put it that way. Victoria tried to get Betty to wear some of the nicest of her new clothes, but Betty refused because the occasion was never suitable for them. And that was that.

When Betty bought these clothes, what occasions was she imagining? I imagine Betty visiting her closets, holding dresses and skirts to herself, and dreaming about a different world.

Saint-Just: Betty's third life

Saint-Just isn't a place. He's an idealistic resistance fighter we meet at the end of Lucie Cabrol's first life. That life ends when her two brothers accuse her of making love to Saint-Just—who at nineteen is half her age—while telling her brothers that she was dressing his wound. Lucie, incensed, leaves her brothers and the family farm forever.

Saint-Just isn't his family name. His fellow fighters give him the name presumably because of his revolutionary zeal and his middle-class upbringing. Everyone else in the novella is a peasant.

Saint-Just's upper-thigh wound may or may not have been from his and his comrade's earlier skirmish with the SS. And Lucie may or may not have made love with him. Within two days after Saint-Just leaves Lucie and her brothers, the village hears that the Milice found the two resistance fighters and killed them.

There’s this scene during Lucie's third life where the narrator meets Saint-Just. Saint-Just still wants justice, as he does when he is fighting in the resistance. But death has taught him something about justice:

Who are you? I asked, you’re not from here.

Lucie knew me as Saint-Just, he replied.

You were in the Maquis!

We were ordered to dig our graves and we were shot.

I will tell you something, I said. There were Nazis who escaped after the Liberation and came to the Argentine, they changed their names and they lived off the fat of the pampas.

They only escaped for a moment.

You can’t be so sure, can you?

Justice will be done.

When?

When the living know what the dead suffered.

He said this without a trace of bitterness in his voice, as if he had more than all the patience in the world.⁶

I think Betty's three walk-in closets are also full of patience, or what the Bible calls the “patience of hope."⁷

Clothes can be an emblem of hope. Paul compares our resurrection to putting on clothes:

For herein we groan, fervently longing to clothe ourselves about in our dwelling from heaven, inasmuch as, in being clothed, we shall not be found naked. For indeed in this tent, being burdened, we groan, since we do not wish to unclothe ourselves, but rather to clothe ourselves, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.⁸

Clothing is not just a means of survival but an expression of hope and a means of preparing for a hoped-for future. Paul looks forward to when mortality is “swallowed up by life,” when the body is covered with resurrection’s clothing.

Paul's description of the resurrection as clothing brings to mind Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. Consider Professor Teufelsdröckh's “Philosophy of Clothing,” in which clothing isn’t only survival but also “victory over want”:

“All visible things are Emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and body it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the King’s-mantle downwards, are Emblematic, not of want only, but of a manifold cunning Victory over Want."⁹

Hannah Arendt understands the public world as a kind of victory over private wants.¹⁰ Jesus also separates private wants from public calling, but he tells us to put the public calling first. God will see to our private needs—including, Jesus says, “What shall we wear?”—as we seek God's public world first.¹¹

Betty's clothes are, perhaps, emblematic of her new victory over want. Like Lucie in her second life, Betty in her second life no longer worked to make ends meet. She helped others with their needs for clothing just as Lucie brings the forest’s bounty to the city. But Betty’s victories were small compared to what they presaged.

In their second lives, both Betty and Lucie had to hide their victories over want. Until their third lives, neither could live their full lives on earth.

And I think Betty imagined, in her own way, a public world in which she and the people she clothed would find or create the moments their clothes told them they were made for.

Above: Betty. The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

1. Berger, John. “The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol.” In Pig Earth, 1st Vintage International ed. Into Their Labours 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1992, 162.

2. Revelation 5:4-6.

3. Berger, 165.

4. Berger, 167.

5. Berger, 165.

6. Berger, 173.

7. 1 Thessalonians 1:3 KJV.

8. 2 Corinthians 5:2-4, Hart, New Testament, 357.

9. Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Edited by Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor. Reissued. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008, 56.

10. Arendt, Human Condition, 73.

11. Matthew 6:31-34 REB.