Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  “You have the strangest thoughts, Ritchie.”

  “Strange interesting or strange scary?”

  “A little of each.”

  “Is she going to like me?”

  “Yes, I think so. Feron likes things not easy to figure out.”

  “What a weird name. Like a feral cat or something. Why would anyone name a girl that?”

  “There was this character in a movie her mother saw, and she liked the sound of it.”

  “A girl character?”

  “I assume so. It sounded odd to me at first, but now I think it suits her perfectly.”

  “Mom and Dad should be taking off in his plane soon. You know, don’t you, that you can learn to fly years and years before you get your student pilot’s license. I know a lot already.”

  “You do?”

  “I’ve been at the controls of Dad’s Cessna a lot. You’d be surprised the things I can do already.”

  “Just as long as Dad’s sitting right beside you.”

  “I bet they had a luxury buffet lunch at the Greenbrier, and they’re getting ready to leave for the airport. It will be getting dark when Mr. Jack takes us to meet them at our airport. And then we will make them open their Christmas presents as soon as we get home.”

  “They may be tired. We should maybe wait till tomorrow.”

  “But your friend Feral is coming tomorrow. I’ll bet the first thing she asks is why would anyone want to paint their barns black.”

  “Let that be the last time you utter that nickname.”

  “But if she were my sister, I could call her Feral, right? Just like with you. When I was little, I couldn’t pronounce her name, so I called her Feral and it stuck.”

  “You just uttered it two more times. Let that be it, okay?”

  “Sorry, Merry Grape.”

  “And you can explain to her how the black traps the heat and gives our leaves that famous Jellicoe crackle.”

  “Hey, wouldn’t that make a fabulous radio pitch? It would come after the auctioneer winds down his chant, like in the Lucky Strike ad. Then we could have another guy, like on The Shadow, say in a really deep voice: THAT FAMOUS JELLICOE CRACKLE.”

  “Actually, that’s an interesting idea, Ritchie. Tell it to Dad.”

  “Listen, tell me something. What do you really think about Mr. Jack?”

  “Mr. Jack? Other than he’s Daddy’s manager, I can’t say I ever think about him at all. What on earth made you ask that?”

  “Because he just parked in front of the house. He’s not supposed to pick us up to go to the airport for two more hours. And he has that look he gets when nobody’s looking.”

  “I wonder what he wants. What look?”

  “It’s different from when he’s with any of us. It’s like another person has taken over.”

  “You’ve been reading too many of those fright comic books.”

  “No, it’s something I’ve noticed. I just never got around to saying it until now.”

  “Well, there’s the doorbell, Ritchie. Go down and see what he wants.”

  Left alone, Merry walked to the door of her room, “became” Feron, turned around, and, as Feron, looked at Merry’s room. Feron heard Merry saying, “This is your bed, Feron, it looks out over our orchards.”

  And she, being Feron, would say what? Oh, what a nice view. Or just “Oh.”

  That first day when Merry had asked which bed she wanted, Feron had said, “You got here first. You should be the first to choose.” Merry had been sure she would take the window, but Feron said she liked corners.

  Now I’ve given her my bed, which is both in the corner and looks out over our orchards. Knowing Feron, she might say nothing at all. She might not appreciate this room. She might not appreciate our family. But how could she not?

  You never can tell with Feron. Sometimes she looks at me like I’m too simple to be believed. But other times she looks at me like she’s counting on me above all others to keep her intact. It didn’t take very long to figure out that she was more complicated and had suffered more. The family things. The dead front tooth, which she brought up herself and how she got it. I had of course noticed it right away, and it was like she wanted to protect herself from having to hear me ask, oh, what happened to your tooth? Which I would never have done, of course. The odd thing was, seeing the tooth was what made me realize how handsome she would be if the tooth was fixed.

  Why, Merry wondered, was she so anxious for Feron’s approval of her family and home? Why had Feron so easily slid into their friendship?

  What did Feron see in her? Once Merry asked her mother why she never had to make overtures to get new friends. (“I don’t usually have to go first because they seem drawn to me.” Her mother had said, “One of the finest things about you, Merry, is that you have attractions you don’t seem aware of. At least you don’t behave as though you’re aware of them. Oh dear, I hope I haven’t spoiled you by telling you this.”)

  When Merry had first seen Feron in the parking lot, before she knew they were going to be roommates, her impression was of an aloof girl at odds with something or somebody. It didn’t seem to be the man she was with; there was a silent ease between them as they unloaded her stuff. Merry had first assumed they were father and daughter. She was a frowning girl with a stoop. The stoop may have developed because nobody ever corrected her posture or because she thought she was too tall for a girl. She had shocked Merry when she said her small weasel stepfather could send a person sailing across the room. Up until then, Merry had pictured Swain as a lengthy filled-out fellow like their Mr. Jack.

  Feron seemed to prefer Merry’s company to anyone else’s. The only person they both admired was Miss Petrie. If they were younger, you might call it a shared crush.

  Merry felt Feron must be getting something she needed from her, but Merry hadn’t figured out what. Maybe Mama would be able to shed some light on this when she saw them together.

  “Merry Grape!”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Jack wants us downstairs.”

  “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  “No, he says right now!”

  PART TWO

  14

  1968, New York City

  When Feron would wake yet again from what she called “the visit to Merry dream,” she would lie in bed in whatever apartment she was staying and demand of the empty room: “Am I going to keep having this dream till I die?”

  The Merry dream continued to evolve during the decades, stretching into Feron’s old age. The early ones had started with Feron aboard the bus, on the way to visit her roommate in the days after Christmas, a visit that in real life had never happened. Or, Feron was already in front of the Jellicoe house, and they were standing in a row like a family of paper dolls waiting to greet her.

  In later years, Feron would dream that Merry watched over her or guided her. Or sometimes that they were horsing around in a devil-may-care way they had never achieved in life.

  In the most distressing dream, Merry had published a book about their friendship, which had won all sorts of prizes, and Feron burned with envy and wondered why she had not written this book herself. When she woke from this dream, she would demand of herself, “When am I going to outgrow this envy?” She would recall Merry’s unnerving fluency when she applied herself to her homework, how she had settled down on her bed in her brother’s pajamas and started writing out Miss Petrie’s assigned story as if a switch had been turned on.

  What if, after your death, you were fated to carry your dreams into eternity, like a backpack fused to your soul?

  Then Feron reenters whatever time period she happens to have awakened in and marches herself through the debriefing. On the day Feron was to arrive for her after-Christmas visit, the Jellicoe parents crashed their plane flying home from the Tobacco Growers’ convention at the Greenbrier. Merry never returned to Lovegood; she had to take care of her twelve-year-old brother and run the tobacco farm until he came of age.

&nb
sp; Now it is fall, going on winter, of 1968. Feron’s husband, Will, is dead. Aunt Mabel is dead. President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas five years ago, the same year as Will’s death. His brother Robert was assassinated this summer in Los Angeles, two months after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Uncle Rowan has been reelected mayor of Pullen and is still engaged to Blanche Buttner. Merry has published a story in the Atlantic Monthly. During her first year alone in New York, Feron committed to paper a sort-of novel about her brief marriage, titled The English Winter, had it typed professionally, and sent it to seven publishers before she lost heart. So far, Feron has published nothing.

  “The Curing Barn,” by M. G. Petrie. This had leapt out at Feron the previous spring, when she had been putting herself through her monthly ordeal of paging through certain magazines at the branch library in mid-Manhattan to see what was being done by her contemporaries.

  My God, Miss Petrie had written a story. M. was certainly Maud, and the G. must be her middle name, which they had never learned. No, wait a minute, the story was about a sister and her younger brother during the first curing day of the tobacco season. What was going on here? All it said on the contributors page was “M. G. Petrie lives in North Carolina.” No gender, but with the tobacco and the younger brother, Feron was sure M. G. was Meredith Grace. But why the last name of their English teacher? It didn’t make sense.

  Unable to sit calmly at the library table and read the story through, Feron went out and bought the Atlantic Monthly so she could agonize over “The Curing Barn” in the privacy of the East Side apartment she was currently housesitting.

  On a hot, dry August day, the sister, in her early twenties, and her teenage brother, along with a crew, are getting the ripe tobacco leaves ready to be hung upside down in the curing barn. The sister is outside in the tying shed instructing some new women recruits in the art of tying three aligned stems, or “hands,” of leaves to a six-foot-long tobacco stick. The workers loaded these sticks on a V-shaped structure, which was then passed, person-to-person, inside the barn, where someone straddled a network of high rafters and guided the sticks to their upside-down hanging places. The person straddling the rafters was the long-legged teenage brother, Randolph. The sister, who is telling the story, is nameless. There is enough back-and-forth among the workers to familiarize you with the process of tobacco curing and some witticisms and hijinks from the boy balancing on the high rafters.

  Then there is a time shift to a future harvest (“cropping”), when they are stacking the sticks in the barn for the drying process, and the sister is guiding two college girls in the art of tying the leaves. The girls are earning good summer money, but also, thinks the sister, they are pleased with themselves for mixing with “farm people.” The boy is no longer in the picture, and you realize that what you are reading now is the present tense of the story. And in this present tense, the sister allows herself to remember the first time six-year-old Randolph was allowed to take part in the curing. His job was to pick off “lugs” before they got woven onto sticks. He delighted in screaming, “Out you go, luggie!” every time he snatched out an imperfect leaf.

  And at last the nameless sister forces herself to look up at the rafters and remember how as a young man Randolph proudly straddled the beams and to acknowledge what this story has been building toward. The brother has died in Vietnam, and the sister has been rerunning memories of the curing barn in order to cure herself.

  Feron remembered locking herself in a bathroom stall back at Lovegood and reading Merry’s “Lingering on the Lawn” in order to judge whether it was “acceptable” enough to hand in to Miss Petrie. Feron had reported to Merry that it would be a success if she alerted the reader sooner that the story opened in 1918 and not the present, and advised her to find a better adjective than ordinary to describe the class poet, which was the Merry-character.

  Funny, “The Curing Barn” followed the same pattern as “Lingering on the Lawn.” You realized at the end that what had been taking place was already over and the person was dead. If “The Curing Barn” was autobiographical, then Merry had sacrificed college in order to raise a boy who would become fodder for an unpopular war. Oh, God, the brother on top of the parents! Poor Merry.

  But how had Merry gotten into the Atlantic Monthly ten years after the canceled visit in the last days of 1958? (“I have shocking news,” Blanche Buttner had said, putting down the phone. “I am so sorry, Feron, but you won’t be taking the bus to visit the Jellicoes.”)

  Surely Merry must have suffered the humiliation of having her work returned in the dreaded self-addressed envelopes. Or not? If Merry still kept up her unnerving fluency, maybe on her first try she had sent “The Curing Barn” off to the Atlantic and received a return acceptance. Maybe, oh God, there were more M. G. Petrie stories awaiting publication.

  “The Curing Barn” was the kind of story that contained death yet left the reader feeling complete. You understood that the sister had kept faith with her tobacco barn reruns and found a way to contain her grief. Her loss was simply part of the ongoing human drama. The American flag covering the brother’s footlocker at the end signified the kind of “coverings” that a human being could live with.

  Was it that Feron’s work lacked any “covering” element? The characters were always grasping to understand what was happening to them, but the endings were unsatisfactory. “The ending is unclear” was the single personal note scrawled on one of Feron’s seven printed rejection slips. (At the time, Feron had derived an atom of comfort that the person must have read to the end. Or at least skimmed.)

  She had not come up with any “clear ending” to the event in her life chronicled in An English Winter. She had known while writing that she was trying to capture things she wanted to remember, but she hadn’t seen beyond that. Like the sister in Merry’s Atlantic story, she had been moving forward slowly, allowing herself to recollect what was acceptable in bits and pieces after Will had died from a fall off a Northumberland cliff in January 1963.

  After “The Curing Barn” had ambushed Feron in the branch library last spring, it would have been perfectly possible to pick up the phone and dial “information” for an M. G. Jellicoe listed in Hamlin, North Carolina. Within moments she could have been connected to her old Lovegood roommate. But Feron had been a fickle letter writer during the time when Merry needed to hear from her the most, and Merry did not make it to Feron’s wedding in the spring of 1962. She had a conflict: Ritchie was playing the major role of Stage Manager in his high school play, Our Town. She sent Feron a covered silver serving dish, which was embarrassingly expensive, considering their lapsed friendship.

  After reading M. G. Petrie’s story in the spring of 1968 (“an Atlantic First,” accompanied by a striking pen-and-ink drawing of an open barn with tobacco leaves hanging upside down), Feron opened the box with the rejected manuscript of An English Winter and grimaced at the task ahead. She stared at the title page for a minute, then resolutely crossed out An English Winter and wrote A Singular Romance above it. Tomorrow she would buy a new legal pad and begin again.

  Good old Meredith Grace. Depend on her to wake up the sleeping demon of competitiveness and goad it into action. Perhaps the best way to start, Feron had decided on the weekend morning she began afresh, was just to write steadily across the page, one line after another, using the easy language you’d use if someone happened to ask you: “How did you come to marry that particular man?”

  He was a professor at the university. He was older. The requirements for his course were intimidating. I considered dropping the course because I couldn’t risk any more bad grades my second semester. One reason I didn’t drop it was because I would never learn why he thought individuals in the period from 950 to 1150 A.D. had been reaching toward the highest feelings human nature were capable of, but sadly didn’t make it. What were those feelings, and why not? The other reason was that I shrank from the picture of myself going up to his desk and asking him to sign
my transfer slip. As he had done with those other dropouts, he would sign it with a frosty smile and without bothering to look up at the person.

  Halfway through the first legal pad, she had relaxed enough to switch into third person and become someone both herself and not herself. At the end of the fourth legal pad, after researching England and Durham more than absolutely necessary, she had come to the scene where she needed to get them in bed. In real life and in her novel, they were spending the night with his mother before their transatlantic flight. They were upstairs in Will’s old room, and the husband was leaning forward over the sill, looking at the stars above his mother’s garden, and she was standing behind him with her arms around his waist.

  Astonishingly, writing about this young woman pressed against his back awoke in her the powerful longing she had felt at the window. Yes, he’s mine now, we can take our time and do justice to our highest feelings. After the excitement of the wedding, and the nervousness about tomorrow’s journey, she and Will had agreed to stay chaste while they were in his mother’s house. It had been her suggestion, one of the wisest acts of her short marriage. She had picked up on Will’s anxiety, whether it came from fear of not pleasing her or his reluctance to “make sounds” while in his mother’s house.

  Will’s loss hit her afresh, and she capped her pen. I will never be able to “write him back,” so what’s the point?

  She would start a new legal pad to elucidate their bed life in Durham, she decided.

  Dear Merry,

  You will probably be surprised to hear from me. I’ve been meaning to write since last April, when I came across “The Curing Barn” in the Atlantic Monthly. Congratulations! I have so many questions. But let me start by telling you something you might not know. My husband, Will, died in January of 1963, we were spending the year in England where he had a fellowship, and he went hiking by himself and fell from a cliff. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. I don’t want to. Since then I have been living in New York, working at various jobs and trying to write. Do I guess right from the story that you lost your brother? If so, I hurt for you. What a waste, what a loss. I am really curious about the “Petrie” pen name. How did that come about? If you feel like answering this, please send it to my office address, since I don’t have my own place yet. I have a sort of editorial position at MacFarlane & Co., a big management consultant firm here. It pays well and keeps my mental energies more or less undiminished so I can do my own writing at night.