Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  Marguerite was unaware that she had been a walking symbol for Feron since Feron first laid eyes on her sixteen years earlier. It had been July 1963, when Feron was newly widowed. She and Uncle Rowan were having an early supper at Howard Johnson’s. In came a proud trio, an elderly couple and a serene middle-aged lady whom the hostess reverently seated at the best window booth. Uncle Rowan jumped up. (“I’ll just go over and pay my respects.”) He had begun his campaign to be elected mayor of Pullen. “That’s General Steed and his wife. And that’s their daughter, Marguerite, who has one of the finest collections of dolls in the world. She has won all kinds of prizes. Every Christmas they open their house, and there are these priceless dolls in glass cabinets.”

  My God, Feron had thought. Surely as a young woman, Marguerite Steed must have had other plans for herself than becoming a middle-aged doll collector still living with her parents. Feron had spent the first months of her widowhood in Blanche Buttner’s stately house, but seeing the general’s daughter had been her wake-up call. It was time to get out of here and be off on her own.

  “I keep my more personal ones upstairs,” Marguerite was saying. “I could take you up after this crowd thins, if you’re interested.”

  “I would love that.”

  Her new cousin returned with two glass cups of eggnog.

  “Uncle Rowan was the nearest thing I had to a hero. If he hadn’t been available when I was seventeen, I might have ended up in jail. He showed me how to tap better outlets for my energy. Which we can all use at seventeen. Uncle Rowan himself had the kind of energy that could have taken him as far as he wanted to go, but he chose not to leave his pond.”

  “Would you have known my father?”

  “I was a little tyke when Uncle Woody passed, but from what I’ve heard he was a sweet fellow, kind of a dreamer, not, well, as strong-minded as Uncle Rowan. By the way, who was that sublime little woman in the black hat at his funeral?”

  “There were several black hats on the scene that day, but I think you’re probably referring to Merry Jellicoe. She was my roommate at Lovegood College. Not for very long, because her parents died in a plane crash and she had to drop out of school and raise her little brother. And then he was killed in Vietnam. So she’s down in Hamlin, running the family tobacco business by herself.”

  “That little slip of a thing?”

  “That little slip of a thing. She saw Uncle Rowan’s obituary in the News and Observer and came over to the funeral, which touched me. I hadn’t seen her in ten years.”

  Thad Hood produced a card from his wallet. “Next time you see her, which I hope won’t be ten years from now, please give her this card and say I’m your cousin and if she ever needs our services.”

  THAD S. HOOD

  SURVEYORS AND APPRAISERS

  NO PROPERTY TOO SMALL OR TOO LARGE

  “You’re in luck,” Feron told him, slipping the card into her jacket pocket. “I’m having lunch with Merry tomorrow.”

  “What are you planning on doing with Uncle Rowan’s house?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind what to do with it.”

  “That’s exactly what Blanche Buttner said about the little airfield he left her. ‘Thad, what am I going to do with an airfield?’ she said. I had my own quandary about the rental property he left me. I didn’t have the heart to kick out the old couple who had been renting the house for twenty years. And then I realized that had been his intention all along. He knew he could count on me to let them fade away in comfort and afterward convert it into a showpiece. It’s a Queen Anne cottage, way too big for them. It would make a fabulous restaurant if zoning permitted. Well, who knows? By the time they vacate it, the zoning might have changed. Now, in your case, I advise finding some responsible renters—for now.”

  “How does one go about finding responsible renters?”

  “Oh. I can help you with that.” He said “hep,” just like Uncle Rowan and handed over a second business card. “Call me when you’re ready. Get it cleared out, redo the floors, put in a modern kitchen and—how many bathrooms are there?”

  “There’s a full bath upstairs and a half-bath downstairs.”

  “Is there enough space to make it into a full bath?”

  “I think so. I’d have to check. I’m staying with Blanche over Christmas.”

  “Rowan’s house hasn’t had anything done to it since Great-Granny Hood lived there.”

  “Was that Sophie Sewell Hood?”

  “Why, yes, but I never thought of her as anything but Great-Granny Hood. She was something of a virago, but she could cook. I doubt if Uncle Rowan ever once cooked a meal in that kitchen. It would be worth the outlay if you’re looking for prime renters. Pullen’s in commuting distance to Raleigh and the Research Triangle. If you rented it for two hundred fifty, you’d make back your investment in two years. I could help you with that, too.”

  When the party had shrunk to a clutch of Blanche’s faithful friends and a few old-timers gathered around the general, Feron followed Marguerite Steed upstairs to see the more personal dolls and confronted herself in a long pier mirror hung between two windows on the landing. She was not petite, and the winter light was unflattering. Though she had been described as “very personable” in her MacFarlane & Company file, and Will’s mother had told him (which he of course reported to her) “Feron has the kind of looks that will mature well,” nobody would ever refer to her as “sublime.”

  Marguerite’s upstairs dolls in no way resembled the ones on display downstairs. For a start, there was not a single porcelain doll. Once, when Feron had been racking her brain for a story someone might publish, she had pounced on the tale of a middle-aged woman who lived with her aged parents and collected porcelain dolls. The woman was a porcelain doll herself. As long as she stayed inside her parents’ house, her porcelain youth and beautiful equanimity would last. Unable to imagine an ending she liked, Feron had abandoned the idea.

  Unlike the downstairs dolls, these figures, settled in the window seats or on the floor, were uncanny, a few downright ugly. There was an evil-looking clown, a primitive woman made of straw, and a large sad doll in a hat and ragged coat, carrying a worn suitcase. Marguerite was telling how she belonged to a doll club. “We exchange photos and sometimes trade or buy from one another. The straw doll is a nineteenth-century Mexican ‘Kitchen Witch.’ They kept it in their kitchens and called it ‘La Última Muñeca’ … And look at the expert stitching on my little housewife fleeing Nazi Germany—she’s a copy of an Edith Samuels doll, the Israeli dollmaker: I couldn’t afford the real thing. And this tacky little thing in pink satin and lace with the outrageous yellow hair is the first doll I ever bought with my own money … it’s a Sparkle Plenty doll. Do you remember the Li’l Abner comic strip?”

  Feron asked if Marguerite’s parents had seen the upstairs dolls in their own house. “Mama would come in here sometimes. Once, oh, when I was about twelve, we tried to make a schoolgirl doll, with clothes and bookbag, but it was an amateurish failure and we destroyed it.”

  Feron was looking forward to laughing with Uncle Rowan after the party about Marguerite’s weird upstairs dolls until she remembered that he was gone.

  21

  Merry had suggested lunch at the Neuse River Café.

  “It’s midway between Benton Grange and Hamlin. There’s a bar, so the lights are kept low and the food is plain but good. Probably your uncle will have taken you there.”

  “No, he would meet his cronies there, but Blanche didn’t like it. She thought their Board Game was obsolete and morbid.”

  “Oh, then we’ll think of another place.”

  “No, no, no. I’d love to see it. I want to see the Board Game.”

  They made a date for twelve thirty, the day after Christmas. It would be their first sit-down meeting since the Algonquin, eleven years before.

  Feron left Benton Grange too early because she was still uncertain of herself behind the wheel. Uncle Rowan had left her his 1974 Oldsmob
ile 98, and before she returned to New York after his funeral in August, Blanche had taught her to drive, losing her equanimity only once, when her student sailed through a stop sign. The last time Feron had seen her lose it was over twenty years before, when Feron had tried to wriggle out of delivering Aunt Mabel’s Christmas present. (“Oh, you go ahead without me.”)

  Feron’s neglect of Merry had become a chronic drip-drip of guilt on her conscience. After Merry’s prompt and affectionate thank-you letter following their Algonquin meeting, Feron’s procrastination in answering lapsed into a failure to answer. Then time went by and Feron made no further contact, though Merry was often in her thoughts. When Feron read in the news that tobacco companies could no longer advertise on radio or television, she wrote a sort of wry condolence letter to Merry, but disliked the tone and decided not to mail it.

  Merry remained a constant figure in Feron’s dream life, and she continued to serve as a moral compass when Feron felt she needed direction: “Would Merry do this, would Merry consider it wrong?” (Take MacFarlane & Co. office supplies home for her personal use? Co-opt a perfect idea from someone else’s writing, changing a couple of words so you wouldn’t be caught plagiarizing?) However, Feron didn’t necessarily feel obliged to follow what the compass told her.

  How could you feel so bound up with the idea of what someone meant to you, yet feel no urge to get in touch with the real person? After all, Merry wasn’t dead. She was at the other end of a letter or phone call. She wasn’t even in another country.

  Feron hadn’t sent her a copy of Beast and Beauty. She had deliberated over it as she had done with the tobacco letter, then concluded it might seem like a boast or a reproach: Well, I’ve been busy, as you see. How are all your stories you write and read aloud to yourself and then rewrite again coming along?

  As soon as Feron had spotted “the sublime little lady in the black hat” coming through the church door at Uncle Rowan’s funeral, she began practicing lines of excuse and apology she wouldn’t need to use. When they were face-to-face, Merry hugged her and behaved as though it had not been eleven years since she had written Feron and received no reply. She had actually apologized to Feron for showing up! (“I wasn’t sure whether it was my place, since I had never met him. I can’t stay long at the reception because we’re right in the midst of harvesting, but I thought you might be pleased to see me.”)

  As she was departing, to get back to her harvesting, Merry had said, “Feron, next time you come down here, let’s meet for lunch.”

  “I’ll probably be back at Christmas. I’d love to meet for lunch.”

  “Well, my number’s in the phone book. If you still want to meet at Christmas, you phone me.”

  And Feron had phoned.

  “I can tell you what you don’t know about yourself, when you’re ready to ask.” Her mentor and former teacher Alexy Cuervo liked to challenge her. So far, Feron had resisted his offer. Alexy Cuervo, teacher, mentor, or evil genius? Sometimes Feron felt as though she had made a contract with the devil: the writing teacher at Columbia who had told his students the first day, “Write anything you want, but don’t bore me with the conventional.”

  “Sir, could you define what you mean by ‘conventional’?”

  There was a student like that in most classes. Like the one in Will’s Medieval England class who had protested, “But, sir, you don’t allow points for improvement.” After which he transferred out of Will’s class.

  “Certainly,” replied Cuervo. “What I’m looking for is something more than the utilitarian narrative which narrowed minds perceive as a sufficient picture of reality.” He was a small, rather delicate man, yet they cowered before him.

  How glad Feron was that someone else had asked the question!

  Nevertheless, she had amassed ninety pages of A Singular Romance, and he was being paid to teach an MFA course, and teaching included having to read his students’ writings.

  She went to her first tutorial armed to defend her conventional novel-in-progress. But Cuervo was respectful. I must have misread him, she thought, confronting his black-browed pointy face regarding her from above his customary white guayabera with dark ascot and the turquoise cufflinks he always wore.

  “Will you be surprised,” he began in his tripping Spanish cadences, “when I tell you I read all of it? Yes, it is conventional. It could have been written a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago. But I was curious, because you had caught something, oh, strange, different, about this odd trio, the mother and son and the young woman. If she continues with this, I thought, she should take more chances.”

  “What kind of chances?”

  “You have more strangeness in you than you are aware of. I would urge you to cultivate the strangeness. You can glimpse the undersides of people’s lives, what is going on beneath the realistic narrative.”

  “But do you think I should go on with it, my novel?”

  “It has a propulsion, it may be leading you toward something you don’t yet know. Writing can do that. But perhaps you could use a short sabbatical. I will set you a task, like someone sets the hero a task in the fairy tales. He’s known as the donor figure, so I will be your donor. Go to the library and browse through Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale. Don’t try to read it, just see which ideas jump off the pages for you, his theories of character and narrative structure. And investigate some fairy tales. I want you to write me a story, set in the present day, based on a fairy tale. Think of it as a class assignment.”

  “When is it due?”

  “When you feel you have fulfilled your task.”

  Feron had taken a seat in a booth facing the parking lot of the Neuse River Café so she could watch for Merry’s arrival. What kind of car would she drive? How would the “sublime little lady” be dressed for lunch with her old roommate?

  But she got diverted by the Board Game—Blanche was right, it was obsolete and morbid—also ridiculous to an outsider like herself. Her placemat had a map of the battle lines (Blue for the Confederacy, Red for the Union) of the last month of the Civil War in North Carolina. If you wanted to play the game, there were directions at the bottom of the placemat. You got up and went to the board, which covered most of a wall, and pushed buttons and knobs, like with arcade games, and changed the results. Of course, to play you needed a thorough knowledge of the battles and what circumstances might have changed the outcome, but people down here seemed to have memorized the history, backward and forward, of what they called “The War Between the States.”

  “Oh, Feron, I’m sorry. Have you been waiting long? I thought we said half past twelve, but then I wasn’t sure, so I tried to get here by quarter after twelve so I wouldn’t be horribly late if it turned out we had said twelve.”

  “I got here early. I’m new to driving and allowed myself time for mistakes. You look radiant, Merry. What’s your secret?”

  Merry, an easy blusher, colored up.

  “Well, probably because I’m rested. This is the one time in our year when there’s nothing we have to do. In January we will start burning the undergrowth of last summer’s harvest and preparing the seedbeds indoors. Then we wait till April to transplant the seedbeds into the fields. The transplanting was always my favorite part, even as a child. I wish Daddy could have seen our brand-new transplanter; it looks and sounds like a giant mosquito spreading its wings across the fields.”

  Shedding a black suede fleece-lined coat, she slid into the booth, tossing in her tote bag first. She was still petite. A paisley scarf of mingled pinks, reds, greens, and black was banded low on her forehead to push back her hair. She wore a maroon sweater dress with a string of black pearls. Any stranger would take her for the stylish lady down from the city and me for the country woman in twill pants, tweed jacket, and turtleneck, Feron thought. Though Feron didn’t think she qualified for “sublime,” the woman across from her did have that quality of containment that Feron had noted back in their dorm room on the first day, as though God had
taken pains to color all of her inside the lines. However, there did seem to be more of the containment, or indwelling, or whatever it was. Was there more of it, or had it just become more solidified?

  The waitress was prompt. “How grand to see you again, Miss Jellicoe. What will you all have?”

  “Do you have any specials, Patty, or is it too soon after Christmas?”

  “We have a special special because of the Christmas leftovers. The cook made this delicious turkey chili. I had some earlier and I recommend it. We also have bass, brought up this morning from the coast. You can have it fried or broiled. It comes with French fries, coleslaw, and hush puppies.”

  “Now I’m sorry I ate breakfast,” said Merry. “Patty, this is my friend Feron Hood. We roomed together at Lovegood College. Feron’s a writer. She lives in New York now.”

  The New York part didn’t seem to impress her. “Would you by any chance be kin to Mayor Hood from Pullen?”

  “He’s my uncle. I mean was. He died last summer.”

  “Oh, everyone knows that! Mayor Hood was one of our favorite customers.”

  “I’d like a cup of the turkey chili and two of those hush puppies from the other special, if that’s allowed,” said Merry. “Feron?”

  “I’m sorry I ate breakfast, too. I’m staying with Blanche and she sets out a sideboard breakfast every day. But I’d like the bass, broiled, with all the trimmings, only small portions.”

  “Got it, ladies. Bring you some iced tea or something stronger while you’re waiting?”

  “Iced tea,” said Merry. “Is that okay with you, Feron?”

  “We have sweetened and unsweetened.”

  Merry wanted sweetened, which Feron would have liked, too, but in recent years she put on pounds if she didn’t watch it. So far, bargaining had worked: small portion of fries versus no sugar in tea.

  Merry patted around in her tote bag and extracted a hardcover copy of Beast and Beauty with its handsome red-and-black cover of lovers swirling around in flames. She laid it like a statement on the table between them.