Maggie Dandridge Stevens

The mother of Gavin and Maggie - Mrs. Lemuel Stevens, nee Maggie Dandridge - doesn't appear in person in the fictions, but various items associated with her do. In Intruder in the Dust the hat Eunice Habersham wears reminds her grandson Chick Mallison of her; it's a "round faintly dusty-looked black hat set squarely on the top of her head" (73); on both women, this looks "exactly right" (127). In "Knight's Gambit" Chick thinks of the books in his family's house as "the books . . . which his grandmother had chosen" (149). In The Town Chick's mother, Maggie Mallison, wears his grandmother's "diamond ear-rings" to the Cotillion Ball (75). Talking with Chick in this novel Gavin even remembers the car he drove when he went to the Backus place to ask permission to marry Melisandre as "your grandmother's car" (246). She is also mentioned by Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder.