by Gail Godwin
“But couldn’t you and your friend still meet, Feron?”
“Well, it got complicated. We weren’t in each other’s orbit anymore. Sometimes we’d meet on the elevator, and it was just so awkward. Neither of us knew what to say. I guess she felt I had betrayed her somehow. Or maybe it was just me feeling bad about leaving her behind. It still makes me uncomfortable to think about it.”
“You said in your letter that you could do your job and then come home and write at night because it hadn’t drained your mental energies.”
“If I’m not too tired. Same as you. MacFarlane pays well and has little perks to make you feel like family. For instance, you can sign up to apartment-sit for employees who are going on vacation or leave. You have to be interviewed by the owner, you also have to get bonded, but a nice place to stay in this town is a gift from the gods. It’s usually for only a month or so, but meanwhile I’m saving all that rent money, and it makes me keep my belongings down to a minimum.”
“It sounds ideal. Maybe not for the long haul, but—”
“No, not for the long haul. I’m hoping to have my own place when I save up enough to pay the security and two months’ advance rent.”
“You plan on staying here, then?”
“The city suits me. I feel invisible when I want to be, observing the human scene. I never fail to see something that takes me by surprise. Also I like to walk, Will got me into that. He’d walked obsessively, ever since he was a little boy, and the doctor told his parents that for many people the brain was stimulated by walking.”
“You’re not afraid of walking around by yourself?”
“I don’t walk at night. Though I often dream I’m walking at night. But I’m always alone in these dreams, so the only thing I have to be afraid of is what I might dream next.”
“Oh, Feron, I’ve missed you so. You say such unusual things. I remember once when we were sitting on the lawn at Lovegood, I was wondering what happened to the class poet of 1918, and you counted on your fingers in the grass and said she would be in her upper fifties. Then I’ll never forget it, you said her life was probably not over, but set—like Jell-O. I wish we could stay in touch. Tell me where I can always be sure to reach you.”
“The surest way would be care of my uncle. Rowan Hood, Pullen, North Carolina. That would be enough.”
“Do you ever think of your time at Lovegood?”
“It’s more like I carry it with me. It provides a whole sort of reference aura. I mean, my husband, Will, knew exactly who Miss McCorkle was, her staunch work ethic and her sassy figures of speech to make history come alive: he often brought her up. He approved of her. And there’s Miss Petrie, of course. I was shocked when I returned in the fall and learned she had left when Miss Olafson got a better job. I never became close to Miss Petrie like you did, but Chekhov inhabits me and that whole notion of Miss Petrie’s that in reading or writing you have to get used to being left in uncertainty.”
“See? That’s what I mean. I don’t have someone in my world who talks about ‘reference auras’ and being more afraid of what you might dream than going out at night.”
“Well, you may not believe this, Merry, but you are in my reference aura, too. When I come up against some moral problem, I ask myself what you would do. And, except for Will, I have never felt so at ease with someone day and night. I felt that you were always on my side.”
17
Leaving the Algonquin, Feron walked east on Forty-fourth and turned left on Fifth. The big cast-iron clock on the corner pointed to half-past four. Was a person like Merry born with her character, or had it been built up brick-by-brick by people who taught her to choose the good, the kind, and the true?
It was not officially rush hour, but hurriers filled the sidewalks in both directions. I never fail to see something that takes me by surprise, she had told Merry. Just close your eyes for a second, and what do you see when you open them again?
Today it was a domineering old geezer yelling at a young nurse guiding him along the sidewalk. A spruced-up gentleman looking pleased with himself, carrying a bunch of red roses. But, oh no, who was approaching him? It was the lady with the veiled hat and dirty gloves, laden with Lord and Taylor bags. This was Feron’s third sighting.
The first had been an actual encounter. Feron had just turned the corner from Fifty-seventh onto Fifth when the lady laden with bags approached her.
“Excuse me, but you look like a nice young lady. My wallet has been stolen and I have no money to get home. Can you help me?”
“Of course! How much do you need?”
“Whatever you can spare.”
Feeling magnanimous, Feron placed a ten in the outstretched gloved hand. That’s when she saw the gloves were dirty.
The second time, it had been raining, and Feron huddled with others on the porch of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. She heard a familiar voice addressing an older man: “Excuse me, sir. I wonder if you could help me. My wallet was stolen and I have no money to get home.” “Why, that’s awful. How much do you need?” “Whatever you can spare.” The woman set down her Lord & Taylor bags to put the bill in her purse, and the man walked away. Then Feron had done a spontaneous thing that turned out to be stupid. Stepping forward, she caught the woman’s eye. “Hello again!” Feron said. Giving her a horrified, affronted look, the woman fled the porch into the rain. This time Feron had seen into the Lord & Taylor bags. They contained folded clothes but not those bought today in a store.
Now the woman had accosted the gentleman with the red roses, who was handing her bills from his wallet. He continued talking to her until she excused herself and walked down the block.
Fifty-seventh and Fifth, Fifty-fourth and Fifth? Was Fifth Avenue her territory? What had happened to bring her to her present occupation? Could it happen to me? wondered Feron. But I would never choose waylaying people on the street. How humiliating if someone said, “Get along with you, Granny.” If I were going to steal, thought Feron, it would most likely be something more solitary, like embezzling.
“I have stayed off Fifth Avenue for fifteen years,” Shawna Samuels would matter-of-factly remark. “As I’ve said, I try to avoid any situation that brings on dissatisfaction with myself.”
Shawna had been right, you had only to look in store windows to see that Manhattan’s streets and avenues had a hierarchy based on appearance and possessions. Feron did not need to “stay off Fifth” because in whatever direction she walked she knew she had a safety net beneath her feet. She was still in her twenties and considered this a temporary job. She had Uncle Rowan. “At least let me help you,” he implored, pronouncing it “hep.” He had wanted to wire quarterly deposits to a bank in New York.
“Thank you, Uncle Rowan, but I need to know I can do it by myself.”
But hadn’t she spent every Christmas with him and Blanche Buttner since coming back from England?
When the Jellicoe parents were killed, Merry had no choice but to go home and raise her little brother and keep the family business going. If being authentically self-reliant meant having no alternative, Feron wondered if that made her a fake.
When Will fell to his death in England, walking too close to the edge of the Saltburn cliffs with his mind in the clouds, Uncle Rowan flew over to guide her through the labyrinth of practical and legal requirements. He even phoned Will’s mother when Feron said she wasn’t up to it. And after Will’s body was flown home and buried—his mother following him within half a year—Feron was encouraged, indeed expected, to move into Blanche’s spacious Benton Grange house, an eight-mile drive from Uncle Rowan in Pullen, and get used to being a twenty-three-year-old widow before she decided what to do with the rest of her life.
What had really happened on the bus after the pale man in the dark coat asked if he could sit beside her? She knew he was all right when he added, “I haven’t had a civilized conversation for a while.”
“What makes you think I am civilized?” she had countered.
No one in this world except a person named Dale Flowers knew about those days in Chicago before he pried out of her that she did have an option. She had an uncle, didn’t she? Her late father’s brother? Why didn’t she get on another bus and go introduce herself to the uncle? She had nothing to lose. What a paradox, that “the sinister man,” who had no options, no long-lost relative himself, turned out to be the generous one. She had used him far more than he had her.
As soon as Uncle Rowan had taken a long look at her and announced, “You’re one of us, all right,” Feron had excised Dale Flowers from her biography, though she could not wipe out their time together.
“I mean, everyone has secrets no one else should know.” Didn’t Moral Merry say so herself an hour ago? And blushed under her tan.
If she and Merry had maintained a more “faithful” friendship over the decade, would they have felt easier about exchanging secrets? Though Feron couldn’t imagine what kind of secret a person like Merry could have.
An hour earlier with Merry, she had slid expertly into two lies, the one about the Sunday she had met her medieval history professor in the campus coffee shop—“I was depressed. I’ve forgotten why”—and Will Avery had said he was going for his Sunday visit to his mother, would Feron like to go with him? (“Getting off campus might do you good. It does me, sometimes.”)
And what a whopper about the nice old editor who said a lot of nice things about English Winter! But had to turn it down because it lacked intimate scenes.
And she had been in another state far below “depressed” that Sunday morning in the campus coffee shop. The previous day, Swain Eckert had shown up at her dormitory. He had announced himself to the girl on duty as Feron’s father, which he legally was, and forced Feron to listen to him in the visitors’ parlor as he enumerated all the ways she and her mother had ruined his life. (“She always did look down on me, but I was her ticket out. She raised you to share her lack of kindness, and both of you were spectacular liars, you lived inside a tissue of lies. As long as you got what you wanted, morals could go out the window. You never bothered to thank me for a single thing I did for you. By the way, you still owe me that four hundred and fifty you took out of my shoebox.”)
Swain, dwarfed by the overstuffed parlor chair he had chosen to plop himself into, had announced before they sat down that he was a recovering alcoholic and his visit to Feron—a sixteen-hour drive—was so that he could fulfill Step Eight, “making amends.” She was embarrassed that the girl on duty would now think this seedy man was her father. He looked more compressed than the person she remembered, though the deep armchair may have contributed to that. His hair must have been dyed; it was never that dead brown before. His jacket and pants didn’t go together, and he still wore the awful white socks that he used to insist protected him from athlete’s foot.
“You sound like you drove all this way so I could make amends,” she said.
“I’m sorry if I was hard on you, Feron. I did it for your own good, so you wouldn’t grow up spoiled rotten like your mother, but my temper wasn’t always the best. I flew off the handle a lot more than I do now and, you know, slapped you around.”
“I’d call it hitting rather than slapping. You knocked both of us to the floor plenty of times.”
“I don’t remember ever knocking anyone to the floor, but if I slapped, that was wrong and I want to make amends.”
Swain, having recited this, appeared as pleased with himself as someone who has just performed a noble act. Wriggling up straighter in the armchair, he recrossed his legs and launched into a confession about how unhappy he had been at the time.
“I was twenty-three. I was an honorably discharged pilot, I had the GI Bill for college, my whole life in front of me. And next thing I know, I’m getting married to a pregnant woman who says she’s twenty-eight, but actually a few years more, and I have a four-year-old stepdaughter. The baby, by the way, didn’t make it. The next one didn’t and the two after that. By then your mother was a drunk and had turned bitter, and you were not an adult but thought you were.”
“This is a lot to take in,” Feron croaked, having suddenly lost her voice.
“Living with the two of you was like being somewhere you’re not wanted. No, worse, like realizing you’re invisible.”
“Was that when you started making night-journeys to my room to commit your disgusting liberties?”
“What? Oh, the thing you threatened in your runaway letter. If I came after you, you were going to report something that really would send me to jail. When I read that letter, want me to tell you the first thing I felt?”
She nodded. Her knees had begun to shake.
“I felt relief. Then after I got over my relief, I knew I had to make up a good story to tell people. After living with you and your mother, I had the art down cold. I would start by admitting that, sadly, we just hadn’t been able to get along. Not surprising, after you went around saying I’d murdered your mother. Only I didn’t say that part, I knew they were already thinking it. You left with my blessing, I would say. I even threw in the four hundred and fifty as my parting gift to get you started.”
“How did you find out where I was?”
“Your high school principal stopped me on the street and said, ‘Well, it all turned out for the best, didn’t it?’ The dean of that first college you went to had been in touch with him. I didn’t need a detective to keep track of you after that.”
“You weren’t afraid I’d tell about the other?”
“What other?”
“What I just said. The night visits.” Her voice had come back, but it sounded like a little girl’s.
“Any night visits, as you call them, were made up, just like your mother’s murder.”
“What do you mean? I remember them! You creeping down the hall. Holding the latch so nobody could hear you opening and closing my door. Then the shuffle, shuffle in your moccasins across the bare floor to my bed …”
“All details of your fantasy. Details are convincing, I’ve learned that about lying.”
“You drove for sixteen hours to make amends, and then leave out the worst thing you did to me?”
“I didn’t leave it out, Sweetheart, because it didn’t happen.”
His horrible endearment used in arguments, sometimes right before a hitting. In this case, from the overstuffed armchair that enfolded him. They had never owned such a chair in the places they lived.
“Now who’s the liar?” She almost wailed. “Sometimes I’d be asleep and wouldn’t hear you when you came in. I’d wake up and find you kneeling beside my bed, your fingers crawling up into places nobody else had touched. One time I yelled out, and you should have seen yourself scurrying for the door.”
Amazingly, she laughed.
He was silent. Preparing another counterblow? They stared at each other across the parlor. The dark eyes, which could be brooding or commanding, unfortunately brought back a time in her childhood when she had adored him. He had taken her up in his plane and let her control whether it went up or down.
“Oh, me,” he said, uncrossing his legs and working himself out of the deep chair. “Looks like it’s time for me to get back on the road. If things had gone better, I was going to take you to lunch. But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, does it?”
“No.” She didn’t get up.
“I guess you don’t want to see me out.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well …” He was standing over her now. “Enjoy your life. Enjoy your college. Enjoy your youth. Whatever I did or didn’t do, I want you to know I cared about you. I’m sorry everything turned out the way it did.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
Not turning her head to see him out of the room, she remained seated for she couldn’t say how long.
18
The compass went with Merry everywhere. Now it lay inside its case on the pullout table of her roomette, ready to be of service. The train, still in its early departure s
tages, was meandering all over the compass. She would know when it was headed seriously south from the view outside her window. Then she would take the compass out of the case and hold it waist-high in her lap and take her bearings: more for the ritual of doing something Ritchie had taught her than anything else.
Her other items she had stored in the places built for them. Not a lot of room to turn around in, but at least it was just yourself turning around in it. Whoever had designed this cubicle must have been proud to have fit so much into the allotted space. Pull-down bed when she was ready (she wasn’t), little sink for a light washup, and you walked down the hall if you wanted the toilet. Her mind had almost twenty-four hours to call its own.
“It’s easy, Merry Grape. This is a genuine U.S. Air Force pocket model from World War II. First I’m going to show you how to take your bearings, and then I’m going to show you how to find a bearing. Once you know that, you’ll be able to locate the Jellicoe properties from your dorm window.”
“But I can’t take away your compass, Ritchie. It’s your prized possession.”
“You’re not taking it away. I’m lending it to you. I know how you are. It will keep you from getting homesick. With this compass, Merry Grape, you will always know where you are.”
Six years later, as he was leaving for boot camp, he gave it to her again. “I can’t take this, Ritchie. You’re going to need it more than ever.”
“No, I’m not. They’ll issue me a new one. By now they’ve probably developed one that talks to you in the dark: ‘No, no! Wrong way! Left, stupid, I said left!’ ”
How she missed his imaginative wit. He made things come alive, like the scolding compass guiding you through the dark. He could also see right into people. He was a noticer. Like the day that their old life was already over, but they didn’t know it yet. “Mr. Jack has that look he has when nobody is looking,” Ritchie said, as their father’s manager walked toward their front door hours too early. “It’s like another person has taken over.”