Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  The last time she had felt this kind of shame had been in 1958, when Blanche Buttner had asked what time they should drop by to give Aunt Mabel her Christmas present, and Feron, slipping back into her pre-Pullen rude, begrudging self, had said, “Oh, you go ahead without me.”

  That day Blanche had made a visible effort to hide the extent of her surprise and distaste, just as today Thad’s countenance had gone through a visible downgrading of expectations regarding his cousin.

  Feron’s current apartment-sit was on East Fifty-fourth, a favorite venue, it seemed, for MacFarlane employees. Unlike almost all of her other “sits,” the spruce headquarters of this single man in the engineering department required no removal of objects at odds with her peace of mind. On the walls were framed reproductions of da Vinci drawings of inventions for the future: a helicopter, a tank, an armored car, a parachute with a little figure dangling, and a flying machine shaped like a giant hawk. The mattress was firm, the flatware was Georg Jensen, the sheets were white, and the towels (faintly smelling of lavender) were brown or gray. Her favorite place was the sturdy oak refectory table, large enough to spread out your work with a meal to one side—or the other way around.

  When she took her blue-and-gray Royal portable out of its carrying case, she always set it on a plastic placemat. Though she had never met the owner (one didn’t; it was all done through a MacFarlane go-between), she often imagined him floating above her, unsmilingly approving of her behavior among his things.

  At twilight, it was still raining as she rolled in a sheet of paper and began to type.

  October 21, 1988

  Dear Merry,

  Today I had lunch with Cousin Thad, and he told me about your little boy. I would have written sooner had I known about it. I cannot imagine the experience of such a terrible loss. I wish you had written me. But why should you? Your last letter to me was your gracious reply to my “donor” assignment letter. Then I guess I kept waiting to hear how you were getting on with the Stephen Slade novel, and before I knew it, nine years had gone by and I still hadn’t written back.

  Which is no excuse. I will come right out and say it, Merry: I have been a sorry friend.

  You came out of a stable and loving background. As I’ve told you, you have operated as a sort of moral compass for me. (Would Merry do this?) I will spare you my usual screed about a lying alcoholic mother and—I never told you this—lecherous stepfather. Even as I reveal this now, I wonder if I am not just trying to distract you from looking too clearly at my shameful record as a friend. You deserved better. I didn’t write to you from Lovegood after you had to drop out of school—fortunately you had good people like Miss Petrie—and the only reason I know you received a thank-you note for my wedding gift was because Blanche Buttner made me write all of them before the wedding, to be mailed afterward by her.

  I remember the night of the pageant, when I was hit hard by those words in Lovegood’s processional hymn, “I will never, no never, no never, forsake,” and you reached over, so naturally, and grabbed my hand. You thought I was sad about my mother, but the truth was I was grieving for something I’d never known and couldn’t even put a name to. And though I didn’t learn of it till afterward, you saved me from being caught with my flashlight on when the daughters and granddaughters came to tap me for their club.

  I ask myself now why I never contacted you when I arrived back in the States as a widow and spent six months with Uncle Rowan. You would have grieved with me and asked the right questions and done your utmost, as you always did at Lovegood, to make me feel upheld. From the beginning I have been supported by your belief in me, if that makes any sense to you.

  Will was the second person I felt secure spending days and nights with. You were the first.

  And now I have been living in this city twenty-five years, and on trips back to Pullen I have never made time to visit you at your house.

  I don’t deserve you, but you are my first, best, and truest friend.

  What was I thinking last night? Feron pulled the unfinished second page out of the typewriter. Spread flat on the refectory table, the abandoned letter did not hold up well in the early morning sun.

  What a shameful self-preoccupied piece of crap. Sorry your baby son died, but pity me for being such an awful person. I can see her scanning the typed lines, looking for another mention of her dead child. But then, as always, she would make excuses: “Feron has been tried and tested in ways I can’t begin to imagine.”

  She tore the pages in half and dropped them into the stainless-steel garbage container under the sink.

  October 22, 1988

  Dear Merry,

  Yesterday I had lunch with Cousin Thad, who was in town, and he told me about the loss of your child. I would have written sooner had I known about it. Please know that I grieve for you. I can’t begin to imagine such a loss.

  I probably won’t come down for Christmas this year. Thad might have told you about Blanche Buttner’s new husband and daughter. I went last Christmas because I thought Blanche would be hurt if I didn’t come, and she thought I would be hurt if she didn’t invite me. The four of us smoldered for three days and then I changed my ticket and left early.

  Once again, please accept my condolences for the loss of your little boy.

  Your Old Lovegood friend,

  Feron

  _______________

  October 31, 1988

  Dear Feron,

  Thank you so much for your thoughtful note. It may make you feel better to know that on the first anniversary of Paul’s death, I sat down and began an anguished letter to you, which I never finished and never sent. No friend should have to deal with such a letter. So don’t be hard on yourself about not having known.

  I wanted to write back the day I received your note of October 22, but Jack and I have been busy from dawn to dusk with last-minute cleanup as we get ready to burn the fields in January. We had a record harvest this year, though who knows how long we’ll be allowed to keep up this sort of farming.

  We average about one offer a week from someone wanting to turn the Jellicoe acres into a gated community replete with golf course and man-made pond. So far we haven’t committed ourselves, though Jack is more willing than I am to let it all go. He had his heart set on Paul taking charge one day. If we were to stop before next season, Jellicoe would have brought 190 years of tobacco to market. Jack talks of starting a horse farm, and we have gone so far as to start construction on some stables on the other side of the west field.

  But you haven’t been here, so you won’t be able to picture the west field.

  Cousin Thad drove me over to Pullen one afternoon to see the new guest house and studio, which are beautiful. I could picture you upstairs under the skylight, busy at work on a book. And then maybe after you were done with the day’s work, you would drive over to Hamlin, and we could sit on the west porch and talk about writing.

  Which brings me around to something I am not looking forward to telling you: the story of Stephen Slade. I began writing it immediately after receiving your “donor” letter. I couldn’t wait to fill in the years between 1821, when he discovered bright leaf, and 1914, when he was buried on his own property. It still seemed worth doing after we lost little Paul, and it kept me busy when I might otherwise have lost heart, which would have been bad for Jack, who was worse off than I was.

  I never did send the magazine stuff to Mr. Sterling the agent. Why get his hopes up until I at least had part of a novel to show him? First I tried to write it from Stephen’s point of view alone, then I decided to add a family of sharecroppers who live nearby and become attached to Stephen. So he would have someone to tell things to!

  Then the forebodings started. How had I been arrogant enough to believe I could create a life for this historical figure out of the flimsy materials of my imagination? So I took out current books that probed deeper into the experience of black Americans. I got up the courage to attend Ezekiel African Methodist Episcopal Church, worry
ing I might not be welcome. (Was I ever wrong!)

  The Stephen project finally gave up the ghost last year. During my research down at the Tobacco Museum, I came across a small news item on microfiche, “An Old Negro the First to Cure Bright Tobacco” was the headline from an 1886 edition of the Progressive Farmer. The reporter had been introduced to the old man at a warehouse tobacco auction. Stephen Slade, sixty-five at the time, was delighted to be recognized, and he regaled his interviewer with the story of how it had happened. (“It kep’ on yallowin’ and yallowin’ tell it got clear up.”) The news item ended with the old man saying of his former master, Abisha Slade: “I wish my master was alive and I was his slave.”

  When I left the Tobacco Museum, I knew my novel had died. I couldn’t decide which depressed me more: the reporter’s condescending dialect spelling, or the final wish attributed to Stephen. He couldn’t possibly have said that, I told myself on the way to the truck. Could he?

  And then I thought, maybe he said it because he knew that was what they wanted to hear.

  I can imagine you reading this and saying, “So much for donorship!” However, the experience inspired by your donorship has brought me to a church I love, and some of the women in my Bible study group have become dear friends. Like most children, Ritchie and I had Sunday school and Bible study, but it wasn’t until I started meeting with the Ezekiel Bible group that I realized for the first time that the Bible had been written and put together by people in need of guidance.

  Feron, I can’t believe I have gone on like this. Writing to you has made me realize how much I miss you, even though we can go years without seeing each other.

  Love,

  Merry

  P.S. Today being Halloween, Jack asked, “Would a two-and-a-half-year-old boy be wearing a costume?” I said probably. I remembered when Ritchie was very small, Mother made him a baby bat costume. I was about to go and look in old boxes for that baby bat costume when I realized there was no little boy to wear it. That’s the way it keeps coming back. Sometime when we are face-to-face again, I will try to describe our little boy to you.

  PART FIVE

  30

  1990s

  In the nineties, “the sixties” began cropping up in popular culture. Fashions from the sixties were sought in thrift shops (or vintage shops) and “reinvented” by current designers. There were sixties TV reruns, as well as new shows about the sixties or set in the sixties, with overzealous attention to objects like ashtrays (and smoking in the office), and how women wore their bras, pointy and high on the chest.

  Debut novels were published by young writers who were praised for their assiduous research concerning the “historical period” they’d chosen. Feron remembered being impressed (and envious) as an undergraduate when she learned that George Eliot had set her masterpiece in the time of the Great Reform Act, forty years earlier than her date of writing. Forty years! What an accomplishment, to re-create a setting from such a long-ago time! Yet actually, forty years before, the fifty-two-year-old author of Middlemarch would have been twelve years old, living in that setting and registering things that might never be glimpsed by an assiduous researcher in the future.

  Though Feron gave herself credit for some improvement, her envious competitiveness had not slackened in her fifties. She kept abreast of the bright new retro novels, but found most of them overresearched and lacking the “feel” of the decades she had lived through, registering things that might never be researched later.

  Cuervo had said that Nito’s Garden in itself was a testimony of its need to exist: “Had I not been able to make Nito exist, I would have committed suicide.”

  How many novels out in the world really and truly testified to their need to exist? (Including her own?)

  When her novel A Singular Courtship was about to go to press, her editor said, “You know, I like this. It’s fun to read about intelligent, slightly kinky people. But be warned: readers have been known to punish a writer who switches genres.”

  Yet as her own fifty-third birthday passed, Feron found herself warily basking in the unexpected appreciation of A Singular Courtship.

  Why warily? Because sometime after her new start at Lovegood, she became aware of a built-in gauge that sounded an alarm when the pressure of too much elation threatened to overwhelm her. Why had this gauge not gone off before Lovegood? Because in her life with Swain and her mother, there was no need for anything to protect her from the pressure of too much elation? In those days she had habitually acted as people do when there is nothing good to expect from life and nothing left to lose.

  And she had continued in that mode after escaping Swain and linking up with the man on the bus. It was only after Beast and Beauty had been published that she felt safe enough to look back at that Chicago juncture and dare to imagine where and who she might be if Dale Flowers hadn’t shaken her by the shoulders and said: “Think hard. Don’t you have any family, any blood relatives you might impose upon?” In their dreary Chicago walkup, he was all Feron had, and she didn’t want to leave him. It was he who pushed her out the door when she came up with Uncle Rowan’s name.

  Every time another good thing happened to A Singular Courtship, Feron would mentally cringe and wait for the gauge’s alarm to go off.

  A Singular Courtship was set thirty years before, in the early sixties, when she had been in her last year of college, on the verge of beginning her epistolary exchange with Will’s mother, who would become the courtier in her son’s singular romance.

  “I was not prepared for the humor,” Cuervo said. “You preserved the strangeness I liked in the original draft, but I didn’t expect this humor. Where did it come from?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never thought of myself as particularly humorous, though my roommate back in junior college was always saying I was funny: ‘Not ha-ha funny,’ she’d say, ‘but a dry, kind of sideways funny.’ ”

  “Dry and sideways is good. That was Merry, the tobacco farmer, yes?”

  “After I had started the book over again for the umpteenth time, I realized I kept wanting to stay longer with the mother, and I kept putting off the marriage in England part. Then I thought, what if I never get to the England part? They spend the wedding night at the mother’s house, but I’ve always felt comfortable writing the wedding night because in real life Will and I had made a pact to wait to begin our married life after we got to England and were rested. But they discover that their chosen abstinence is erotic for them both. I decided to end the book there, in bed in the mother’s house, with the marriage erotically unconsummated. They discover that their chosen abstinence is a turn-on for them both. If readers had gotten that far, they would have known these people well enough to expect that since the courtship had been unconventional, the marriage would be, too.”

  “Singular, in fact.”

  “Even if I had gone on to write about the English months, the disclosures would have been singular. Doing it. Refraining from doing it. The different satisfactions each brought. Each couple makes up their own route to passion. ‘Just little details that belong to nobody but them’ is how Merry once described the secret of the lovemaking scene in ‘The Lady with the Little Dog.’

  “Your Chekhov and your Merry and Miss Petrie. What a singular school!”

  “The editor said A Singular Courtship might sell better if we had ‘romance’ in the title. He finally gave up and said it probably wouldn’t make that much difference because I was a niche writer and Singular Courtship wasn’t going to be a blockbuster. He always succeeds in making me feel disposable.”

  “That’s his style. And your niche did expand, didn’t it? You were a finalist for the awards and wouldn’t even go to the dinner.”

  “I knew I wouldn’t win. And you know how I dread socializing. Every time I open my mouth in public something churlish comes out. I would probably lose readers if I went to an event like that. Listen, can I nip out and do some shopping for you before I wend my way home to my present flat-sit?
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br />   “I haven’t had an appetite. If I try something serious, it revolts on me.”

  “Not the beef broth and the Jell-O.”

  “No, they remain on the party list.”

  “But just the lemon and lime flavors. No orange or red.”

  “Lo mismo, querida. Gracias.”

  “De nada, maestro.”

  Cuervo was ill, they both knew what it was, but he had set the tone of formality, which suited them both. He mostly stayed in bed, wearing a sweater and a cap pulled down to cover his lesions. Feron remembered Blanche Buttner saying once about Uncle Rowan’s covert depressions, “Self-control can go a long way, though fewer people choose to make use of theirs these days.”

  Blanche was now living in Uncle Rowan’s house in Pullen. She insisted on paying the topmost rent (quarterly, in advance, through her bank) and repeatedly reminded Feron that she would stay only as long as it was convenient for Feron. Orrin, the man she had wed on the cruise ship, remained at Buttner House in Benton Grange, as did the dreadful daughter Daphne. There was no eviction date set, divorce papers had not been served. “I married the man in full possession of my marbles,” said Blanche. “I made the death-do-us-part vow, I’m a Catholic, and he’s twelve years my senior. Buttner House is in a trust, so let them enjoy it until I pass on.”

  She wrote Feron that living in Rowan’s old house, which had been his grandmother Hood’s before him, felt like being snatched out of an intolerable situation and granted an alternative destiny.

  After Rowan proposed, there was some going back and forth about living in his house. I remember (with mortification!) walking through the house, clop-clop in my high heels, examining the closets, and declaring them “too small.” I wish I didn’t remember his doleful hangdog expression before he covered it with a jolly assurance that we could always add more closets.

  Walking around the house—sunset is so beautiful from the larger windows you put in—I often say aloud: “Rowan, you should see these shining oak floors—I wouldn’t dream of denting them with my old high heels—and the marvelous new kitchen, would you believe it, I am teaching myself to cook … simple things, of course.”