Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  “That’s what he always is,” Merry had told her, carefully stepping around the past tense.)

  “Jack?”

  He turned from the window. Outside was a perennial garden, a bit too well kept, bordering on a grassy lawn still bright with late afternoon sun.

  Immediately she saw that this was to be one of those days when he hadn’t the slightest idea who she was. She watched him reluctantly surrender whatever he had been thinking and dig deeply into his reserves of courtesy. (What thoughts did he have these days? She wished she had just a flicker of access to them!) Except for the diminishment in volume, he looked reassuringly like the man she had known since she was eight and had been married to for fourteen years, but she held back from going closer.

  “I’ve just come to see how you are,” she said.

  “Won’t you sit down?” Which he continued to say, whether he recognized her or not. He pointed to the chair she always sat in.

  Jack-like, he kept standing. After he got past his mistrust stage, he would come closer and pace back and forth in front of her chair, glancing down on her with friendly curiosity, as though straining to recall who she was.

  “I’m just about the same, thank you. All of us here are.”

  That was one of his Laurel Grove phrases. Then, digging into his reserves again, “And how about yourself? What have you been up to?”

  “Well, today it was my turn to host the Ezekiel Bible group at our house. We sat on the west porch and discussed a psalm.”

  “A psalm,” he repeated blankly.

  “Then after they left, I looked over my notes for an article I’m doing for that tobacco magazine. This time they have asked for a history of the unfiltered cigarette in American life.”

  He gave her an opaque stare, as though she had suddenly switched into a foreign language. But at least he was past the mistrust and had begun to pace back and forth in front of her chair with friendly curiosity.

  “So what have you been up to?” he asked again.

  “Well, as I said, the Bible group came and we studied a psalm, then we had a late lunch, and when they left, it was still too early to come here—or at least I thought it was. I forgot that you have supper an hour earlier in daylight savings time.”

  “We’ve had supper. There’s a new lady.”

  “Yes, I saw her. She was doing some crewel embroidery.”

  The word crewel seemed to alarm him. Did he think she meant cruel?

  “It’s embroidery done with wool, and you use a hoop to stretch the fabric. There are a great many stitches.” Corinne, who was absent today because of her great-grandson’s kindergarten graduation, always brought her crewel work to the Bible group. She had embroidered an elaborate banner for the church.

  But now he had turned away from her and gone back to his post at the window. “Why don’t they come like they’re supposed to?” he asked angrily. “What is holding them up?”

  “Who is supposed to be coming?”

  “The fucking excavators. Why don’t they come and get it over with?”

  “They’ve already come and gone, Jack. I told you, but I expect you forgot. Now we’re waiting for the graders and the landscapers. Thad said he would have left the old trees, instead of leveling everything and planting young ones in the sun that will take years to grow.”

  Turning to face her, he looked startled to see her sitting in the chair; she might have just arrived.

  “How faithful you are to come back,” he said in a gentler voice.

  “Jack, I will always come back.”

  “So, tell me, what have you been up to?”

  “Well, you know I told you I was writing this new magazine piece on the history of the unfiltered cigarette …”

  “Oh-oh, can’t buy those anymore.”

  “Well, you can if you go to the right places. I’ve been trying each brand. Today was Lucky Strike day.”

  “You know better than to smoke.”

  “I don’t inhale. I try to, but I do it poorly. But just breathing it in and holding it in my mouth brings back all these old tastes and memories.”

  “You know he doesn’t like it. You’d better let me check your breath before you go back. Get over here.”

  “You want me to—?” He was motioning impatiently for her to stand up, so she stood up.

  But he was already coming to her, with his arms open. Next thing, she was folded into a viselike embrace.

  “Oh,” he groaned. “Oh, oh …”

  Pressed against his diminished form, she smelled the Laurel Grove soap on his skin, the Laurel Grove laundry on his shirt. At least it was his own shirt today.

  She felt his tears wetting the top of her head.

  “Oh, Annie, my God.” With a force almost violent he elevated her chin. “Is it really you?” He kissed her mouth, then kissed it more urgently, as though trying to get inside it.

  “Oh, Annie, what took you so long?”

  34

  When Merry left Laurel Grove, she had two and a half more hours of daylight to get through. Summer solstice had been a month ago, but the days were not all that much shorter. Their mother had been the family’s solstice marker. If you were interested in knowing how much daylight had been lost or gained since the day before, their mother could always tell you to the minute.

  Annie, their mother.

  When Merry reached home, she put off going inside. She didn’t believe in ghosts, though there had been a period following Ritchie’s death when she had longed for him to appear to her, even if he could only come to her in a wraithlike form. But, as with little Paul, she was only permitted to dream about him.

  This evening she didn’t long for, or expect, any family phantoms. What waited for her inside the Jellicoe house, built by great-great-grandparents and added onto by their descendants, were not spirits of the departed but only the need—the task—of reconfiguring all its spaces to assimilate her new knowledge. Reluctant to begin that task, she went again to her chair on the west porch and watched the light fade moment by moment from the sky above what she had come to regard as “Alda’s stables.”

  You have searched me and known me … you are acquainted with all my ways.

  If she could not believe in full that, from somewhere up there in the changing sky, she was being looked at and known, then how far could mere storytelling take her?

  From up there or out there or over there, the story begins, imagine an ever-present Knower whose knowledge is so vast you can only praise it. The Knower, having watched her being knit together in her mother’s womb, knows every thought she could think and every place she could go, however dark that place might be.

  The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

  How can we know it’s the Knower thinking, how do we slip into the rhythm of the Knower’s thoughts?

  The women in the Ezekiel Bible study group asked these questions every other week. Each offered up her ideas, her research, her speculations, and all of them sought guidance from the group’s mind.

  So, in her story, a woman in late middle age looks up at a sky she has known all her life and, on this evening as it darkens, asks the Knower for help.

  You will have to be more specific than that, the Knower in the story says.

  All the things I took for granted, trusted to be as I saw them, what happens when that certainty topples?

  Certainties are always toppling. Are you still the person you thought you were?

  I think I am, but I’m not sure I admire that person.

  Why not?

  For being so complacent and stupid. Once when Feron and I were lying on the lawn back at Lovegood and she had finished telling me her horrors, I said, “The worst that’s ever happened to me was my dog, Sam, dying.”

  How were you feeling when you said that? Smug? Proud? Ashamed?

  Not smug, not ashamed, and certainly not proud. More like “so far so good.” Maybe just a shadow of fear about what could happen in the future.

  And how are
you feeling now, here on the west porch, while you await the stars?

  I’m feeling close to those psalmists of thousands of years ago. All their anguish and rages and petitions. I feel accompanied by them. In fact, I am comforted to know they had the same stars.

  Everything that is said or sung enriches what can be known.

  Enriches even you, the Knower?

  Of course. We’re in this together. Let me ask you a question. Where do you think I am? Up there in the sky, hiding among the stars? Where do I dwell right now when you are sitting on the west porch, waiting for the stars? One just blinked into sight, look to your left, above the red maple you planted for Paul nine years ago. Now I ask you, Meredith Grace, whose name is written in my book, where am I now, and how is it you can hear me so clearly?

  A motor switched off on the other side of the tall hedge. It sounded like Thad’s car, but Thad never came after dark.

  But around the hedge came Thad. It wasn’t quite dark because his shoes were still brown against the light pea gravel of the walkway.

  “Have I come too late?”

  “Not at all. Pull that wicker chair over. I hosted the Bible group today, and everything’s still arranged in a circle.”

  “So you’ve been busy.”

  “For me, I suppose. Then I drove over to see Jack at Laurel Grove.”

  “How’s Jack doing?”

  “His mood and his location in time is always a bit of a surprise. Today he was railing at the excavators for not coming, and then when we were saying good-bye, he thought—well, he took me for my mother.”

  She hoped it was dark enough for him not to see her Merry Grape blush.

  “You aren’t tired?”

  “Not really. I have been putting off going inside.”

  “Why?”

  “Today I took in more information than I’m used to, and I’ve been sitting out here in the—what would you call what it is now? When it’s not quite dark but passes for dark until you see someone coming toward you on the path.”

  “Gloaming is nice.” In a sweet unaffected tenor, Thad began singing:

  In the gloaming oh my darling

  When the lights are dim and low

  And the quiet shadows falling

  softly come and softly go …

  Merry felt his “darling” was addressed to her.

  “Oh, please don’t stop.”

  “That’s all I can remember,” he said.

  “Me, too. Sister Simone said such an interesting thing today, about how words can sing themselves out of us if we already know the tune. She was comparing it to slipping into the rhythm of God’s thoughts. We were studying Psalm 139, the one that starts ‘You have searched me out and known me.’ Tabitha, that’s our church organist, said she wanted Psalm 139 read at her funeral. I think I want it at mine, too.”

  “Please don’t talk about your funeral, Merry. It cuts me up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “To be without you is bad enough. To be without you in the world would be awful.”

  That was the closest he had ever come to saying what she knew he felt.

  “Have you just come straight from work?”

  “I have. I was way up in Alamance County. A rich-as-Croesus fellow tried to bribe me. I’m fifty-four years old, and it’s the first time anyone ever tried to buy me off.”

  “But what did he want?”

  “A higher appraisal on his property than it was worth.”

  “Oh, Thad. What did you do?”

  “Well, luckily, it was said. He didn’t foist a roll of bills on me. So I pretended I hadn’t heard him, and he got the hint and didn’t try it again.”

  “That’s probably what I would do. Though nobody’s tried to bribe me yet.”

  “What’s this about too much information in one day?”

  “Maybe it’s my age, but I’m suddenly waking up to how stupid I’ve been about so many things right under my nose.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, the evil consequences from the plant that has made us so prosperous for nearly two centuries. I had known, of course, the surgeon general made it pretty clear, but it was a kind of padded knowledge. Up until this afternoon, I hadn’t felt the remorse. I was writing another article for the state magazine on the history of the unfiltered cigarette in America. I had a notebook full of interesting things, and I was smoking all the unfiltered brands so I could describe the taste of each. The editor had said, ‘A lot of our readers still smoke,’ and I was sitting in this chair when I suddenly crossed the line from thinking, ‘oh good, they’re going to love my article,’ to ‘they should stop right this minute.’ I’m going to call him tomorrow and explain.”

  “You’re jettisoning it? Yes, that sounds like you.”

  “Then I started rereading Feron’s Mr. Blue, to see if I could justify why she had used a story I had told her about my family. I realized for the first time that I felt used.”

  “I’m not much of a fiction reader, but Lou read Mr. Blue. She said it confused her, and Lou’s not the sort to get confused.”

  “Then when I went to see Jack, he was in one of his other time zones, and he … well, he revealed something about our family that I hadn’t known. I stayed outside because I didn’t feel ready to face the rooms in the light of this new information.”

  Thad bowed forward in his chair, clasping his hands. Since she had known him, his hair had gone completely white. She loved the way he didn’t go in for snappy comebacks. He was thinking over what she had said.

  “Do you feel ready, now?” he asked.

  “Not really. But I realize I have to go indoors sometime.”

  “Would you like for me to go in with you? We can take a tour through all the rooms, and I’ll keep quiet unless I’m spoken to. And you can be quiet, too. How does that sound?”

  “The tour guide just leads the way and doesn’t say anything.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You are a mainstay.”

  “I take that to be a yes for the silent tour.”

  They went into the house without a word. Kitchen. Dining room. Living room. Ritchie’s room. Thad had been in these downstairs rooms, but Merry did wonder what was going through his mind now. She went ahead of him into each room and casually walked around, noting objects, letting the room guide her own thoughts. Thad followed. His naturalness kept the proceeding from seeming absurd.

  As she went first up the stairs, she broke the silence. “These upstairs rooms are mostly bedrooms. This room at the top of the stairs was the old master bedroom, where my grandparents slept. At the end of the hall is the new master bedroom with its own bath. They were added when my parents moved into the house. The grandparents’ old bedroom became my mother’s workroom, where she sewed. She later preferred to retreat to the third floor, to what we called the loft room because it was once a loft. She went to the loft room when she was in her low periods. We were not allowed to go there because she said that’s where she went to put herself back together. When Ritchie was little, he thought that meant if he entered he would find her in pieces.”

  A barely audible laugh from Thad. It was a warm laugh. Thad knew how she felt about Ritchie.

  “Across the hall is my girlhood room, now a rarely used guest room.”

  She stopped to pat the double bed. “There used to be twin beds in here, but they weren’t long enough for adults. The day my parents were killed, I was making up the bed Feron was going to sleep in that night, if she had come. I had switched her over to my bed so she wouldn’t have to look out at the black barns. You remember them. Ritchie thought they were beautiful.”

  “They were regal. I was sorry to see them go.”

  “Soon after we buried my parents, I started sleeping in the new master bedroom, if a forty-year-old room can still be called new, and, well, I’ve been sleeping in it ever since. Did I say something wrong?”

  “No.”

  “You look distressed. What’s wrong?”


  “Only that I’m dying to hold you.”

  “Please don’t die, Thad. Life would be awful without you in it.”

  35

  Susan Fox

  Dean Emerita

  Dinwiddie House

  Lovegood College

  September 10, 1996

  Dear Feron,

  Two years have passed since you so thoughtfully sent me your latest book—at least it was your latest book two years ago. As with your other novels, I sat down and read it straight through. I remember warming to it immediately. “Now, here is something fresh,” I said to myself. “Something fresh—and true.”

  And then, let’s see, my dear friend Eloise Sprunt died. It was not an easeful death. Far from it. I moved in with her during the last months, helped out under the guidance of the hospice people, and spent the remainder of the week cleaning her beautiful self-designed apartment after the undertakers had loaded her body on their gurney and taken her away to be embalmed. Her children, now in their sixties, wanted an open casket funeral and asked me to deliver the eulogy. It was done at the funeral home because Eloise was not a churchgoer.

  Then—what happened next? (I am still recovering memory after a triple bypass, after which I awoke and remembered nothing!) Oh, next came a depression, which was worse in its way than the surgery, because during the depression I could not anticipate a recovery date. What saved me, I think, was that Lovegood was being sued, and I was able to help out while the search committee went looking for a new president.

  I just glanced over what I had written, and it reads like a missive from Calamity Jane. However, I’ll finish the rest of the bad news, and then I want to return to happier subjects, including A Singular Courtship, which I have just this week read again.

  Two girls broke into the sports center to go for a midnight swim, and one of them drowned. The parents sued and won big. President Brook offered his resignation, and it was accepted. Now we finally have a new president, Jillian Norden, a powerhouse with a background in banking and public relations. She is only in her midthirties, but comes to us with a formidable reputation for fund-raising and cost cutting. Married to a quiet, agreeable man some years her senior, with a son about her age.