Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  I was forty-five when I came to Lovegood. Now I am eighty-four. After my recovery from the bypass(es) and the depression, I feel almost dangerously vital. So much so that I forget my age and get reminded of it in myriad ways. The other day, I was in the pharmacy picking up a prescription when an angry young person accused me of “breaking in line.” I stepped aside to let her go ahead of me, but this seemed to increase her annoyance. As I was leaving the pharmacy, she was complaining to the manager, and when she spotted me, she pointed and said, “That’s the one, that’s the old woman who tried to shove ahead of me.” And, you know, it took half a second for me to realize I was “the old woman.”

  I have seen Merry Jellicoe (Rakestraw). She drove up with a friend whose daughter is a student at Lovegood, and we had a wonderful visit here at Dinwiddie House.

  I don’t know if I told you this, but the trustees allow me to live here as an on-campus emblem of old Lovegood values. It is an elegant, rather inconvenient old Victorian house, but after my surgery I moved downstairs, and Mr. Peeler, President Norden’s husband, now has his offices upstairs. Mr. Peeler had a small, very profitable investment company that he sold to a bigger one, and he advises friends about their stocks and carries on an extensive e-mail exchange with friends all over the country. His son has equipped the upstairs offices with the latest connections, and he is giving me tutorials on how to use this daunting new addition to our technology. And Mr. Peeler and I have embarked on a team-teaching elective course for juniors and seniors. In 1989 Lovegood became a four-year college, as you no doubt know from the annual report.

  You and Merry are among Lovegood’s most faithful donors. When Merry was here at Dinwiddie House, she mentioned your Sophie Sewell Hood scholarship and said she wanted to set up a Paul Jellicoe Rakestraw scholarship. That was the little boy who died, which I am sure you know about. You might not know that Mr. Rakestraw has been in an assisted-living home for a few years now. Merry says he doesn’t know who she is anymore, but he seems happy to see her most of the time. She has a full-time job in a funeral home, which she loves.

  And now for your novel. I fell in love with Isobel, Tom’s mother, on the first page. Oh dear, I thought, I hope she stays on through the story, and she did. And Nora, whom Tom brings home unannounced, I immediately saw was an extremely smart but untrusting young woman, socially awkward but aware of her lacks. While she’s not saying much, she is always observing others. I didn’t see it coming but found it convincing that someone like Nora would look over at Tom during their drive back to school and picture herself marrying him and becoming part of the family.

  And the letters, on both sides, were wonderful. Each woman knows herself fairly well and allows the other to know her. As for Tom, I think I got to know as much about his emotional life as Tom does himself. When we are inside his head, it is like suddenly being lifted into lonely, rarefied air. He isn’t at all the sort of person who is interested in figuring out others. He has become one with his vocation. I got excited just by learning a fraction about the subjects he is pursuing. Especially about those medieval centuries when some individuals were striving toward the highest feelings human nature could achieve. “A new respect for human possibilities was in the air,” as he tells them in his first lecture. And Nora was attracted by this idea before she was attracted to Tom. I caught myself wishing that Miss McCorkle could meet Tom and had to remind myself that Tom was a character in a novel! (Miss McCorkle, now Mrs. Radford, and her husband have moved to a retirement center. They are both still active in their church and politics and travel all over the world. They send one of those Christmas letters that goes to everybody, only theirs is full of news worth reading.)

  Dear me, I have just started an eighth sheet of notepaper, writing on both sides. This must come to an end, though I have enjoyed it. Speaking of ends, I was, once again, unprepared for their wedding night. “Passionate abstinence,” what a thoroughly medieval concept, but with Nora and Tom it didn’t seem far-fetched. I expect you got some outcries from the reviewers in this “let-it-all-hang-out” era of ours. Which, in its turn, will go its way, and who knows what comes after? What goes around comes around.

  I eagerly await your next book.

  Yours,

  Susan Fox

  This is deserving of a P.S., after what I wrote above. The president’s husband and I are team teaching an elective course for juniors and seniors listed in the Lovegood catalog as Social Skills in Business. Mr. Peeler’s son, while searching for a profession, spent half a year in England going to Butler School. We are working from his old syllabus. Starting with how to set the table, which fork is for what, moving on to conversational and wardrobe dos and don’ts and so on. And guess what? The class is oversubscribed! What goes around comes around?

  36

  December 8, 1996

  Dear Feron,

  I am counting back and realizing my last letter to you was in 1988. After you wrote in your thoughtful note about little Paul that you might be coming down soon, I finally got up the nerve to write back and tell you I had abandoned my Stephen Slade novel. As it turned out, you didn’t come down, and now, somehow, eight years have gone by.

  I say “somehow,” which I’ll get to now. Ritchie used to say, “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?” and I always said the bad first because then there would be something to look forward to.

  So, let’s see, Jack went into an assisted-living place in 1990 and is still there, or some of him is. Laurel Grove is top of the line, Cousin Thad found it for us (of course!), and we are fortunate to be able to afford it.

  I received an announcement of Mr. Sterling’s death from the literary agency last year.

  The last time you and I met face-to-face was in 1979 at the Neuse River Café. How can that be, when you are with me every day and so frequently in my night life? As you once said of me, you are one of the regulars in my dreams. I do get to hear about you from your cousin Thad. He said that someone left you a beach house, and you are hard at work on a new novel, which you have to finish before you go anywhere. I heard that Blanche Buttner had moved out of your Pullen house and gone back to Benton Grange. I have had a job working in a funeral home since 1993, but no, that has to wait for the good news.

  Early in 1994, I finally went back to the dermatologist (after Jack went to Laurel Grove, I got careless about checkups), and he found a melanoma on the back of my leg. It turned out to have metastasized to other places (lungs, liver) and I went through the whole regime—some “site” surgeries, then chemotherapy and radiation, and felt pretty bad for almost a year. My Bible study group was wonderful; I couldn’t have got through it without them. Your cousin Thad kept asking when I was going to let you know, and I would say, “I hope never, because I intend to get through this. And if she finds out through you, I am not going to be pleased.”

  Now, here is the good news. I am in remission, back at work at Blake’s Funeral Home. My boss is Lavonne Blake, who’s in my Bible study group. Her daughter, Rachel, is graduating from Lovegood in May. Lavonne had to drop out of premed and take over the family business when her father died. I felt close to her from the start, because her story is similar to mine. My job is mostly being a glorified receptionist, but I do lots of other things—except what I can’t do without a funeral director’s license. Do you know one of the things I love most about going to a real job for the first time in my life? Getting dressed! I often think of you when I’m deciding what to wear. “Feron has been doing this for over thirty years,” I say to myself. Dressing for work is like putting on a costume belonging to a different part of yourself.

  I am typing this at home on a desktop computer which your cousin Thad kindly set up for me and taught me how to use. It’s not easy to learn these skills when you’re our age. I am slowly getting proficient with e-mail, if you will let me know your e-mail address. Mine is jellicoe@aol.com. Meanwhile, I’ve learned to write my stories and letters on the computer and print them out. It’s amazing what you
can do—move things around with cut and paste, delete whole sections without having to copy pages over. Remember how I had to rewrite a whole page, just to change ordinary into optimistic, as you had advised after reading my story for Miss Petrie? Young people now will never know the messy, smelly experience of Wite-Out-ing whole paragraphs.

  I’ve started writing again. After my remission, I reread a bunch of stories by Chekhov, and then I chose the title of one—“The Teacher of Literature”—and wrote a story about a young woman like Maud Petrie meeting a young woman like Miss Olafson when they were at the same college. Chekhov’s teacher of literature is a young man who makes a bad marriage which he longs to escape, but I actually got my Maud character and my Olafson character to where they realize their passion for each other and I shamelessly concluded it by stealing phrases from the ending of “The Lady with the Little Dog”: (“Then they spent a long while taking counsel together, talked of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception … [though] it was clear to both of them that they still had a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”) I felt comfortable with my theft because my “Teacher of Literature” will never see the light of day, but I gained a great confidence by seeing it through.

  Now, to A Singular Courtship. I’m not a critic, I never even finished my freshman year as you know, but I think it has taken you to a whole new level. Remember our Algonquin meeting, when you told me a little about your marriage to Will and his mother’s “courtship” and how you hadn’t been able to find a way to write about your married life. “Nothing really fits what Will and I had together,” you said. But in A Singular Courtship I think you have pointed the way. Remember how Miss Petrie quoted Chekhov about how a story can be wholly satisfying if the problems are convincingly set out? Well, you did that in A Singular Courtship, Feron, and now it feels like you have crossed some barrier and can go anywhere you like.

  And your writing is so realistic, though there will always be a touch of the beyond about the way you see things, Feron. Your idea about our “reference auras,” for example. Or that time on the lawn at Lovegood when you tapped your fingers in the grass and said the class poet of 1918 would be in her upper fifties and her life might have become “congealed, like Jell-O.” I still ask myself from time to time, “Does anyone think I have congealed?” And unbelievably we are now in our upper fifties, like Mary Louisa Summerlin was when we talked of her on the lawn.

  Feron, you’ve got to come back down here some time. Please finish your novel and come again. Since we had to cancel your visit that terrible day following the Christmas of ’58, you have yet to see where I live.

  Much love,

  Merry

  Merry read through her e-mail, cut out a few too many mentions of Thad, and added “your cousin” to the others.

  Feron would never hear that personal story from her.

  If my “day of too much information” in the summer of 1992 had not ended with Cousin Thad’s inspired “house tour,” I might have missed possessing the dearest secret of my life.

  She printed the revised pages, folded them into an envelope addressed to Feron’s office, and deliberated between the remaining thirty-two-cent stamps on her Commemorative Year sheet. She had been holding back the four “Indian Dances” to feel close to Ritchie, but now, for Feron, she picked the scariest one Ritchie would have loved best, “Raven Dance.”

  37

  1996

  Feron had at last confronted Cuervo. “You once said you could tell me what I don’t know about myself, but then you never did.”

  “I said, ‘When you’re ready to ask,’ but you never did.”

  “Would you still do it, if I asked?”

  “You’d better ask soon. I experience tolerable and less tolerable days.”

  “You ate your flan, and it stayed down, and you aren’t wearing your nosepiece right now. Is this a tolerable day?”

  “There is more to tell, now that I know you better.”

  “What is that tune you’ve been humming all morning?”

  “ ‘September Song.’ It was high on the charts when I arrived in this country thinking I was Prince of the World. As I was for a while.”

  “ ‘September Song’ was the favorite request my first year at Lovegood! There was this evening radio program called Our Best to You, where people called in. We loved that program, only Merry made us turn off the radio after lights out.”

  “It is embedded in my memory. Incrustado. When I am remembering that time in my life, the song starts up on its own. When I woke up, a phrase was playing in my head.”

  “Oh, which phrase?”

  “ ‘One hasn’t got time for the waiting game.’ I will spare you my off-key singing.”

  “I can’t sing, either.” Nonetheless Feron did: “When the autumn weather / turns the leaves to flame / one hasn’t got time for the waiting game.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, those are the right words, and yes, neither of us can carry a tune.

  I would begin my assessment of your character as follows: A tortuga’s resistance to being known, a shunner of society, quick to see the worst in others but unforgiving when it comes to your own faults. Envious. Competitive. A hungry singularity of mind. Once I would have said a procrastinator, but it is more of a stubborn holding back, an endurance test with yourself to see how long you can not do something. And frugal.”

  “You called me a skinflint.”

  “Let me revise. Having known you for over twenty years, I would choose a more attractive word from my country: amarette. It means ‘always saving.’ ”

  “I know I’m tight with money, but ‘always saving’ sounds much nicer. But I already knew most of these things about myself! Hard on myself, envious, unsocial, wary—though my husband, Will, did say he loved my ‘wary grace.’ He said I moved like someone anticipating a lightning strike, but I kept marching on, my face revealing nothing.”

  “But you haven’t awakened to your rarer strengths. I remember telling you in our first conference that you have more strangeness in you than you know. And you have tapped this strangeness to some degree in your fiction. I can guarantee there is more if you will find openings for it. How many years have you lived in this city?”

  “I came in the late summer of 1963. Will died in January, and then I spent six months with my uncle and his fiancée.”

  “Please, you add it up. My brain is running low on energy. As a matter of fact, I am going to need that nosepiece again.”

  “Oh, no, I’ve tired you out. Maybe you should rest now.”

  “I have all the resting time I need ahead of me. I count more than thirty years.”

  “Ninety-five minus sixty-three is, oh God, thirty-two years. How did that happen?”

  “And how many places did you ‘apartment-sit’?”

  “Offhand I can’t say. I would have to make a list.”

  “I’m not asking you to go into numbers, but you must have saved some money living this monastic life for three decades.”

  “Hardly monastic. There have been some encounters. Mostly unwise and regretted. A few downright embarrassing.”

  “I don’t wish to hear about them, as I don’t wish to share my own encounters. Some of us simply are not adept at maintaining the part that comes after the encounters. Then let’s say monastic in your lack of possessions. While I had to teach myself sparsity after I purchased this tiny apartment, the discipline seems natural to you.”

  “When Will was my professor, he said if you could answer the question ‘What is my discipline?’ you were on solid ground. But he meant discipline more in terms of vocation. I hadn’t found my discipline even after I was married to Will. But during the lonely hours in England when he was over at the university immersed in his discipline, I began to worry that I might never find it. It was beginning to get to me.”

  “Yes, I can see that it would.”

&n
bsp; “Did you get yours earlier in life?”

  “In early life, my main occupation was planning my suicide. I wanted to be under the soil before they realized I was a monster. Then one day I was playing around with a story about a family who does know it has a monster in its midst. I made the father rich and powerful enough to do anything he wants. He builds a walled garden and populates it with other freaks like Nito. But I was telling you how I had to teach myself sparsity, where to you the discipline came naturally.”

  “My not acquiring things began when I moved to New York. While I was living in other people’s places, I couldn’t load myself down with possessions, and the ‘while’ turned into three decades. When I did finally commit myself to a sublet, I found I had lost the getting urge. Except for clothes, but for those I always waited till I went back to Uncle Rowan’s, and his fiancée would take me to her stores and they’d put it on her bill. So my sparsity is tainted with mooching.”

  “Now you have a sublet. When does it end?”

  “Oh my goodness, next year already. But if worse comes to worst, I can always retreat to Pullen and live in my own house.”

  “Is that something you want?”

  “No, I like it here. In New York, you can be invisible, if it suits you. I feel timeless and free, like an untethered artist floating above the buildings in the night sky.”

  “In that case, I will leave my tiny ‘beach house’ to you. But I haven’t finished my assessment. Do you want to hear the rest?”

  “There’s more?”

  “Just a little. You are a faithful friend. Now, don’t wince. Learn to accept a compliment. And you are unemotional …”

  “That’s a compliment?”

  “Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. In Latin America, they might call you vacana, a cool person. Free from what the psychoanalysts call affect. You don’t show much emotion. Why is that, I wonder?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like when you said I could be funny. I never thought of myself as funny. Though Merry said I was. The other, the vacana, hasn’t always worked in my favor. At my mother’s inquest, which I told you about, I didn’t cry. My stepfather cried buckets. Everyone thought my behavior was unnatural and suspicious.”