Gladys Proctor Thorne was born in 1947 in Birmingham, Alabama, and lived sixty-three years as a bookkeeper in Memphis, Tennessee, a daughter of the House of Thorne and the White Ledger who was never called to hunt and who ended by keeping, almost by accident, the accounts of a whole cousinhood. She was the younger child of the railway clerk Edward Thorne and the laundress Helen Sewall, and the sister of the vampire slayer Joseph Thorne. In 1966 she married the electrician Ralph Haddad, and they had one daughter, Angela Haddad, who was not called. She died in 2010 in a car accident, aged sixty-three, and her husband, who had not been well, followed her in the next year. The family remembers her as the laughing, fair, practical Thorne who ran the funeral fund, the flower fund and the Christmas list, and who was never in her life late with a cheque.
She was born in Birmingham by a small family joke. In the spring of 1947 the Illinois Central, which was short of clerks in the great postwar traffic jam of coal, steel and returning soldiers, lent her father for ten weeks to its Birmingham yards, and her mother, who was heavy with the child and had a settled opinion about being left alone in New Orleans, went with him. It was the second time in the family's history that a Thorne had been born in Birmingham on a railwayman's loan, because her father himself had arrived there in the influenza autumn of 1918, and Edward, who liked a coincidence, said that the Thornes were evidently the one family to whom the Illinois Central lent a baby. She was born on a Saturday in May, in a rented room above a shop on Morris Avenue, and was back in New Orleans by midsummer.
Her childhood was divided between two cities. She grew up first in the apartment on Bayou Road, in New Orleans, with her grandfather Joseph, the telegraph operator, at the head of the Sunday table tapping the code on the cloth, and her brother Joseph, four years older, as the quiet boy in the corner who looked like his uncle. When she was six her grandfather died, in his chair, and in 1954 the family moved to Memphis, to a brick house on a street near the freight yards, because her grandmother was failing and her father had been offered a chief clerk's desk. She remembered the two cities, as she said, by their smells, the coffee and the river in New Orleans, and the cotton and the coal smoke in Memphis.
She was a fair, round, cheerful girl who had her father's smile and her mother's practicality, and she was never any trouble. She went to the girls' school on the south side, sang in the choir at the church on the corner, and at fourteen was running the church's Christmas fund, with a ledger, a pencil box and a cheerful ruthlessness that made the deacons nervous. She was told what the family was at fifteen, on a Sunday evening, at the table, by her father and her mother together, as a thing that had always been the case. Her brother was away on the road, and she asked where. She was told that he was working for the Ledger, and that the work was dangerous. She went upstairs and cried for an hour, and came down, and asked if there was anything she could do. It was the Thorne question, and her father, who had asked it himself at twelve, looked at his wife in a way that suggested that the family had perhaps been blessed.
She began at the teachers' college in Memphis, in 1965, and found within a term that she could not abide children who were not her own, and that she was very good with a column of figures. She changed to the business course. She went to work, at nineteen, as a junior bookkeeper at a cotton factor's office on Front Street, where her father had once done the freight for the firm, and where the old men, in their cotton-brown suits, treated her as a granddaughter. She was good. She had a sound hand, an unhurried head and the manner of a person who has never been rattled, which she attributed to having been born in a room above a shop.
She met Ralph Haddad in the spring of 1966, at a church dance, and married him in the autumn of the same year. He was a young electrician of twenty-one, well built, a little shy, who had a way of coming into a room as if he were checking the wiring, and who said that he had never met a girl who could do sums at a dance. He proposed on the porch in June, under a bare bulb that he had just replaced, and she said yes before he had got the question out. They were married at the church on the corner, with her brother, who had come up from the road, as his best man, which was his way of saying what he could not otherwise say. Their daughter Angela Haddad was born in 1969, in the first month of the year, and was never called. She was a placid child who liked cooking and, in due course, the law.
The Vietnam years were hard on the city, and on the cousins. The Ledger's western circuit passed through Memphis, as it had for decades, and her mother kept the house as a depot and her father kept the freight pass. Gladys, who was by then a young woman with a husband and an infant, kept the money. She did it without a plan, and without anyone asking her. She had been entrusted, by a cousin's widow, with a cheque for a hospital bill, and then another, and by the early seventies it was understood among a hundred and fifty Thornes and Proctors in five states that if a hunter's family was behind on the rent, a person in Memphis would hear of it and make it right. She called it the flower fund. It had a ledger, a bank account and a rule that no cousin should ever be asked to explain, and she ran it for thirty-seven years.
She was a bookkeeper by day, at a freight forwarder after the cotton house closed, and for twenty years at an electrical wholesaler, where her husband bought his supplies, and she was a good one, with a talent for finding errors in other people's books, which her colleagues found unsettling. In the evenings she ran the church kitchen, in which she cooked for two hundred on a Saturday, and the cousinhood, in which she kept the birthdays. She sent a card. It had a sum in it, in a small plain envelope, and was never mentioned afterwards. When her mother Helen died in 2002, she spent three days on the telephone, and had every one of the cousins informed, fed and housed before the funeral.
She was killed in 2010 in a car accident. It happened on a wet Thursday in October, on the road back from a funeral in Mississippi, when a truck crossed the median, and she died at the scene at sixty-three. Ralph, who had been ill for some time, outlived her by a few months, and died the next year. The attacks of September 2001 had hit the family hard, and her brother Joseph had been out of contact for three weeks, and she had kept the telephone beside her chair until he rang. The flower fund passed to her daughter, who read the ledger and found, on the last page, a line in pencil that said that all accounts were paid.
Gladys Proctor Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as the bookkeeper of the cousinhood, the cheerful Memphis woman who paid the bills that the hunters could not and never asked to be thanked. In the Slayerverse she stands for the kin of the White Ledger who were never called, the keepers of the funds, the funeral lists and the Christmas cards, who made sure that a hunter's family never went without.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
