The eighth installment of a serialized memoir of a bygone Mobile is about the awkward cohabitation of business sense and sentiment, and about a downtown that was emptying out around a man who did not want to leave it.
The year 1959 was a punishing one. Still working evenings at the newspaper after finishing his day at the brokerage, the author would use whatever time remained before his 5 p.m. reporting hour to stop by his mother’s house on South Lawrence Street — checking on tenants, collecting rent, or simply lying down for a few minutes’ rest. He would come back at seven for supper.
His mother had always cooked for him on the nights he worked at the paper, and she had taken great joy in having him there. Now he warmed canned soup for himself in her kitchen.
The two sentences describe a life rearranged. The routine survived; the person at the center of it did not. Supper at seven became a man and a can opener in a kitchen that still belonged, in every way that mattered, to someone gone.
An Apartment Full of Her Things
The evenings in the quiet apartment were gloomy. Around him were the things she had gathered over a lifetime on very slender means — some beautiful antique pieces, assembled slowly, arranged with care. In recent years, with her children no longer draining her income, she had made her small corner of a decaying downtown into something lovely.
That last detail carries the weight of the whole installment. A woman who had spent decades supporting children on a thin income had, only in her final years, been able to arrange her rooms to her own taste — the antiques bought one at a time, the placement considered, the small house on a declining street turned into a place of her own making. Her son inherited not a fortune but a composition: a finished thing, made by her, that he now had to dismantle.
He seldom missed a day going by the house, even when he was not working at the paper. It may be hard for a reader to understand, he writes, but in his own mind each visit was a visit to his mother. There was comfort in being surrounded by what had been dear to her.
He has rarely gone to her grave. That, he says, is not his mother. His mother is the old apartment and the things in it.
The line is the emotional center of the installment, and it explains everything else in it: why the sale was so hard, why the visits continued daily, why the arithmetic of the ledger never quite settled the question. A grave is a marker; the apartment was a presence. Mourning happened on South Lawrence Street, among the antiques, not at the cemetery.
It pained him to know that the relics would have to go. Keeping the house made no sense; and even if the family had kept it, a few years of neglect would have reduced it to a shambles.
The reasoning is the voice of the brokerage talking, and it is correct — old houses with small rents do not reward sentiment. But the memoir makes no effort to pretend the reasoning resolved anything. The head had done its arithmetic; the heart had moved into the apartment and would not come out.
The Ledger
The numbers were modest and shrinking in real terms. Rental income in 1959 was $2,034.50, clearing $1,202.70 before depreciation. The following year was more stable — only eleven tenants in the five apartments — grossing $2,072.50 and netting $1,021.71 before depreciation.
Adjusted for what money bought at the time, those figures describe a property that could pay its way but could never pay for its own future. A few thousand dollars a year in gross rent on a five-apartment house, in a downtown district that was bleeding residents to the suburbs, left no reserve for the roof, the wiring or the plumbing that an aging building eventually demands. The house was solvent the way a slowly sinking boat is afloat.
That was also the year he lost one of his mother’s two remaining tenants. A woman who loved quiet and order, and who greeted him with a barrage of complaints whenever he came by, finally could not tolerate the newer tenants and moved out. He hated to lose her; she was a good tenant and one of the few remaining links to his mother.
She came back in 1961, having lost her job as switchboard operator at the old Battle House Hotel and needing cheaper lodging. He made the difficult decision to rent her his mother’s own apartment.
The Battle House connection placed the woman squarely in the world his mother had lived in — the same downtown Mobile, the same grand hotel era, the same order of things. Renting her the mother’s apartment was an act of kindness braided with an act of self-harm: it installed a stranger in the most sacred rooms he knew, and it ended something he had not yet been willing to give up.
She managed one month’s rent. After that she lived there free in exchange for looking after the house. By then he had given up the newspaper job and no longer came by as often. And with someone living in his mother’s rooms, the bittersweet habit of spending an hour reminiscing in those surroundings was over.
Early in 1961 another of his mother’s tenants died. The links to her days at 57 South Lawrence Street were dissolving one by one. In early 1964 the switchboard operator left as well, unable to find work and unable to make it even with free rent; she moved in with a niece on Old Shell Road and lived there until her death.
The losses came in an order that felt designed. First the routine, then the tenants, then the habit of the visits themselves — each year peeling away one more connection between the man and the house where his mother had made her lovely corner of a decaying downtown.
Living on Borrowed Time
The old house, by then, was on borrowed time. Sooner or later some major repair would come due — a bill that could easily consume a full year’s gross rent or more — and the three heirs would face an unhappy choice between throwing good money after bad and shuttering the place.
The author wanted badly to keep it operating at a profit. His one prospective buyer, the neighbor who wanted the lot for parking, was content to wait for exactly the moment when maintenance became impossible and the house could be had for almost nothing.
The standoff was a patient one, and both sides understood it. The neighbor did not need to negotiate, threaten or bid; he needed only to wait, because time itself was doing the negotiating. Downtown Mobile in the early 1960s was shedding residents and small landlords faster than it gained them, and every year of deferred maintenance moved the old house closer to the buyer’s price.
The buyer was under some pressure of his own. He needed parking for his tenants and had been forced into temporary arrangements at lots a few blocks away, which his tenants disliked; when he had vacancies, the lack of on-site parking sometimes cost him prospects.
That pressure is what gave the neighborhood its uneasy equilibrium. A landlord losing prospects for want of spaces is not a landlord who can wait forever — but he is a landlord who can wait longer than a widow’s son can hold a house that costs more to fix than it earns. The economics of the block had already decided the question; only the calendar was left to fill in.
Then, out of the blue, the memoirist writes, Albert Schock came to the rescue.
With that single sentence the installment ends its middle movement — the rescue arrives unnamed and unexplained, a door left deliberately open for the next chapter. What Schock did, and what it saved, belongs to the ninth installment.
The Mobile Behind the Memoir
The setting of the installment is as much a character as the house. South Lawrence Street sat in the part of downtown that was emptying out through the late 1950s and early 1960s, as families moved to the new subdivisions spreading west along Old Shell Road and Airport Boulevard and the old residential blocks gave way to offices, parking and commerce. Houses like his mother’s — five apartments, built for a denser downtown — were becoming stranded assets in a neighborhood that no longer needed housing.
The Battle House Hotel, whose switchboard had employed the tenant who would end up in his mother’s apartment, was itself a monument to that older downtown: the grand hotel where traveling businessmen stayed and Mobile society dined, operating in an era when the center of the city held everything — work, lodging, trade — within walking distance. By 1961, the patterns of the city had moved on, and the people at the margins of that older world, like an elderly switchboard operator between jobs, were the first to feel it.
The memoir’s serial format gives the installment its particular texture. Eight chapters in, the reader knows the author’s working life at the brokerage and the newspaper, the family’s history, and the voice that measures everything twice — once in dollars and once in memory. The ledger entries sit next to the meditation on graves and apartments precisely because both are the same subject: what the house was worth, and to whom.
The detail of the 5 p.m. reporting hour and the 7 p.m. supper belongs to a Mobile where a man could hold two jobs across town from each other and walk the distance between them — the brokerage downtown, the newspaper nearby, the mother’s house on the way. It was a compact city, and the compactness is what made the routine possible, and made its breaking so visible.
What the installment finally records is a transaction that never quite happened. The heirs held a house they could not afford to keep; a neighbor held a price he could afford to wait for; and between them stood the memory of a woman who had made a lovely thing of a small life on a street that was moving on without her. The next installment, the author promises, will bring the wrecking ball, the parking lot, all gone but memories.
Next in the series: The wrecking ball, the parking lot, all gone but memories.