Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  Let’s get together and explore this further. Here’s my street address. I don’t have e-mail yet.

  Sincerely,

  Feron Hood

  39

  January 10, 1997

  Dear Merry,

  Just think: three years from now we will be in the new millennium. I am learning e-mail. I have a young friend, a filmmaker, who is doing her best to drag me into the twenty-first century. I’m already familiar with the internet from my job at MacFarlane’s, from which I have been “bought out.”

  I don’t really know where to start. How does a friend begin a letter to a friend who had cancer and didn’t tell her? I am surprised Cousin Thad held out. But the last thing he would want in the world would be to go against your wishes.

  Maybe, like you, I’ll begin with the dreary stuff. My great friend and mentor Alexy Cuervo died in 1995. The “beach house” Thad mentioned that Cuervo left me is a small fifth-floor apartment in Greenwich Village. Cuervo called it his beach house because if you stick your head out the window and look left, you can see the Hudson River.

  Let’s see. My “retirement” from MacFarlane & Company. (By the way, use my home address on this envelope from now on.) The young woman in Human Resources, as Personnel is now called, looked into my folder and exclaimed: “I wasn’t even born in 1963!” (The year I started at MacFarlane.)

  “I expect you’ve seen a lot of changes at MacFarlane in your time,” she said.

  “Mostly just the computer screen that ruined the tranquility of my office,” I said. “But human nature at MacFarlane has remained pretty much the same.”

  Her desk name plate said Trudi M. Schube. Trudi M. Schube said, “I heard you wrote some novels under another name than Avery. I stopped in to Barnes and Noble hoping to buy one so you could sign it for me today, but they didn’t have any books by Feron Hood.”

  At the end, when she stood up and came around the desk to shake my hand for graciously accepting “the package,” she said, “I am planning to write a novel when I can find the time.”

  “Oh? What will it be about?”

  “It will be about a modern woman in the city, sort of contemporary.”

  I said, “Well, don’t wait too long. Time has a way of slipping by. Before you know it, you’ll be receiving your buyout package.”

  I am really sorry to hear about Jack, but as you say it’s fortunate he can be in a place like Laurel Grove.

  And I’m sorry about Mr. Sterling, your literary agent. I will never forget opening that Atlantic and seeing a story by “M. G. Petrie.” I’m glad you are writing again. It’s a way of life, isn’t it? I just killed off the novel I told Thad I couldn’t go anywhere until I finished. Yes, Blanche is back at Benton Grange, getting rid of all the furniture that the dreadful daughter-in-law didn’t make off with.

  I love your idea of picking out a Chekhov story title and writing a story with the same title. Maybe I’ll try that myself. After my young friend Josie acquaints me with the laptop she says I am going to buy, maybe I’ll break it in by writing a Chekhov story.

  Thank you for the good things you said about A Singular Courtship. I, too, thought I had crossed some barrier and freed up a little more of myself, but then the old panicked ambition kicked in, and I started thinking, A Singular Courtship was published in 1994, better get going on another book. And up popped The Woman Who Lied.

  Are there certain poisonous topics lying in wait to bring a too-determined writer down?

  I had a good letter last year from Dean Fox.

  Your job sounds fascinating. Tell me more.

  Love,

  Feron

  _______________

  Blake Funeral Home

  January 20, 1997

  Dear Feron,

  It has been so hectic around here. In this business, you can go days without a service or a burial, and then suddenly there are pileups. But I want to clear up something about my not telling you. In your young life you were tested so much. I guess I didn’t want to add to the weight. I didn’t want you to feel you had to drop everything and fly to my bedside. But if, God forbid, it should happen again, I promise I will let you know.

  Love,

  Merry

  _______________

  January 30, 1997

  Dear Merry,

  Thank you for your promise. Think of it this way. If you didn’t tell me and I found out too late, it would be the worst test of my life and I could never forgive myself.

  Will had a student in his Medieval England class who asked him, “Shouldn’t a person’s improvement count for part of the grade?” During our marriage, we often quoted Mr. Tribby, who dropped the course after Will said no. When Will and I were being hard on ourselves for one reason or another, one of us would ask, “But shouldn’t a person’s improvement count for part of the grade?”

  Which is my way of telling you that during our thirty-nine years of friendship, I believe I have improved. Don’t worry about sparing me.

  I am off to buy that damn laptop with my young filmmaker and mentor.

  Love,

  Feron

  _______________

  February 14, 1997

  Dear Merry,

  My e-mail address is fhood@aol.com.

  And now I will compose my very first e-mail on Valentine’s Day. Here is a short-short story: My young mentor, Josie, told me I had to go out more. (“If people don’t see you, they forget about you.”) So I dressed up—a nice pantsuit and makeup, and went with her to a party. Artists, filmmakers, a few writers. I was introduced to a woman about my age, who said, “Feron Hood, the writer?” “Yes, that’s me,” I replied modestly. “Oh,” she said. “I thought you had died.”

  Love,

  Feron

  _______________

  February 14, 1997

  Oh, Feron, how awful. But happy Valentine’s Day back. And I am so glad you’re on e-mail now. You know what I love? The instantaneousness of it! With a letter, you wait until you accumulate enough to fill it up, but with e-mail it’s okay to send off a sentence or two. Whatever is on your mind that day, that hour.

  _______________

  May 1, 1997

  Oh, Feron, we have planted trees between us and the new development, but we can still see over the tops of them. Speaking of trees, the developers have cut down all the mature trees in our shelterbelts. Trees form a shelterbelt, which changes the energy in the air and the moisture of the soil in the fields. I am glad Jack will never see the new landscape.

  _______________

  May 21, 1997

  Dear Merry,

  I’m so glad I have you to complain to. My editor asked if I was “working on anything,” and I told him I’d had some promising false starts. I said, “Why haven’t I achieved more? In twenty-one years I’ve only published three books.” He said that writers were like fingerprints, no two alike, and you didn’t compare fingerprints. “Balzac wrote eighty-five novels in his last twenty years, averaging two or three a year. Flaubert’s wildly successful debut was never repeated.” “But I haven’t done either one of those things,” I said. “There you go, comparing again,” he said. “Be grateful for what you have.”

  _______________

  On August 31, 1997, early morning, Merry wrote:

  Princess Di is dead. It’s all over the news. I feel I have lost a lovely friend I was always eager to keep track of.

  On December 14, Merry wrote:

  Jack died this morning, at 6 A.M. A Laurel Grove nurse he liked was with him. The bewildering part, Feron, is they had kept the body in his bed so I could say good-bye, but I was already seeing the old Jack in my mind as I was packing away his things to take home.

  40

  1998

  Feron’s fifty-seventh year was turning out to be a year of reckoning. (Though, counting forward from her June birthday, it was her fifty-eighth year.)

  She slipped on an icy sidewalk and broke her foot. Trapped on the fifth floor of a building with an elevator that b
roke down at least twice a month, it occurred to her that it might not be practical to spend her aging years in New York. What held her here? She had been bought out of her day job, though fortunately MacFarlane’s health benefits would last until she was sixty-five. Which was only eight years away.

  For the first time, she was dependent on others. Josie now served her as Feron had served Cuervo. Josie admired her—maybe a little too much—and would have moved in if there had been space. The two men on the fourth floor, who had known Cuervo, checked in to see that she had food and books. One of them, an organist at a nearby Episcopal church, baked, and the other was a librarian in the branch library.

  Even her editor, by turns emboldening and deprecatory, showed up with an orchid from his greenhouse. “This will live, if you take proper care of it. So: with your foot in a cast, have you started anything new?”

  Feron told him what she had been reading. A novel about a contemporary hostess built on Mrs. Dalloway’s story, and the suicide of an AIDS-stricken man built on the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith. ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants,’ as my husband Will would have put it. But it made me want to reread Mrs. Dalloway, so I did.”

  “Any giant tempting you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. There was the English writer Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, which got me contemplating the power of envy and spite.”

  “Amsterdam was a scathing little treat, wasn’t it? Are you sardonic enough? I don’t know.”

  “I’ve also been toying with the idea of a young widow, but I don’t feel like basing her on myself, so I would have to invent whole new circumstances.”

  “If you could find new circumstances, young widow has a built-in allure.”

  “Except I’ve promised Josie Maglia a draft of the screenplay for Mr. Blue in a month.”

  “How is that going?”

  “It’s not. The more I’m with these people, the less they want to say.”

  “Mr. Blue was your bête noire novel. Or should I say bête bleu? Though it didn’t do too badly, and Joachim’s paintings make it a collector’s item. Perhaps Josie will end up doing another semi-silent film. She was certainly rewarded for Brother Death. Maybe your screenplay won’t be required.”

  Blanche wrote that she had sent a “small truckload of nice furniture over to your house—courtesy of Thad. He says he’ll store it in the guest house/study, which so far is bare. There’s the walnut pedestal writing table, where you spent many hours writing during your six-month stay with me, and the sturdy chair that went with the desk. How Daphne overlooked the chair, which is a Chippendale, I don’t know.”

  The librarian on the floor below asked if she had read all of Jane Austen.

  “All but one. I couldn’t stand that goody-goody heroine in Mansfield Park.”

  She tried again with the copy he brought her and found herself in a wholly different moral place than the one inhabited by the scornful younger Feron. Fanny Price’s transplant from low to high on the privilege scale was painfully similar to her own. She cringed when Sir Thomas said of the poor niece he is about to bring into his family:

  “We shall probably see much to wish altered in her, and must prepare ourselves for gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions, and very distressing vulgarity of manner; but these are not incurable faults.”

  But Fanny was nine when she came to live at Mansfield Park, and Feron was eighteen when she walked up the wooden stairs and into her uncle’s office and identified herself.

  She exempted her eighteen-year-old self from gross ignorance and meanness of opinions, but when it came to distressing vulgarity of manner, she could hear Blanche Buttner as clear as yesterday: “But Rowan expects it.”

  Did moral life grow more attractive as desires narrowed?

  She had tired of her “color game.” Black, fake white, misty green, verdigris, and so on. It was time to find other means for measuring her improvement, to quote Mr. Tribby.

  If you could “age out” of concern for what would get you further and concentrate instead on what you really wanted to become, what would life be like? A clarified, simplified landscape? No longer always to be focused on means to an end, but just staying alert for the worthy seeker of your consideration. And being glad you are able to provide it.

  Like Uncle Rowan, at ease behind his desk in his upstairs office, ready for her when she walked in the door.

  Like herself, perhaps one day, at ease with herself after having stopped trying to turn everything into the next book. Alert, yes, but not trying to imagine beforehand whose footsteps are on the stairs.

  41

  1999

  Blanche Buttner had died. Easter fell on April fourth that year, and Blanche had been found collapsed over the side of her bed on Good Friday.

  Blanche would have been pleased. Or maybe she was pleased in her afterlife. Good Friday was her favorite day in the church calendar. Starting with Maundy Thursday after the altar was stripped bare and remaining bare until the dawn of Easter Sunday. (“Everything is going, going, gone, and then we have to submit to the darkness and desolation in between. For me, the desolation has always been my high point. To fully grasp the magnitude of what you’ve lost requires the experience of having to do without it.”)

  Blanche’s housekeeper found her in a kneeling position on a pillow on the floor beside her bed. Her body was still warm.

  Cousin Thad phoned Feron on Friday evening. Since she had acquired the device, Feron had become an answering-machine lurker. She never picked up until she knew who was calling. Even then, she usually waited until the caller had dispensed a portion of the message.

  “Okay, Cousin Feron, if you’re there, pick up. This is Thad, and you know I never call unless I have something necessary to tell you.”

  Those closest to her were aware of this. Their total number did not begin to add up to one of Cuervo’s “scores.” But, as friends do, they accepted her ways.

  “What’s up, Thad?”

  “Oh, good. Feron, this is about Blanche Buttner, whom I know you were close to.”

  “You said ‘were.’ ”

  “Yes, this morning. Her housekeeper said she passed away while she was praying. What a way to go. Listen, knowing how travel arrangements rattle you, I’ve booked you on a flight from Newark for Monday the fifth, arriving in Raleigh at 2:45 P.M. The funeral is at ten on Tuesday.”

  “Where do I stay overnight? I suppose the house in Pullen.”

  “Well, here’s the good news after the bad news. Merry will meet you at the airport, and you’ll stay at her house. Then she’ll go with you to the funeral Tuesday, and after that she’ll drive you back to the airport for the afternoon flight to New York. I’ve booked the return, too.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  “One more thing. Blanche’s priest called me and asked if you’d like to do the second reading at the funeral mass. It’s—wait, I’ve got it here: Romans eight, verses eighteen to the end. I have to call him back either way.”

  “Either way, what?”

  “Whether you agree to read it or not. It was in Blanche’s funeral suggestions that you read that passage.”

  “Well, then, of course I will read it.”

  Romans 8:18–end, Feron scribbled on a notepad.

  Like everything physical, the airport had altered over time.

  The first Raleigh-Durham Airport Feron had known had been like a good-sized warehouse set in the middle of farmland. As the plane was descending, you could look out the window and see whoever was waiting for you standing out on the tarmac. In those years the airport was hardly more advanced than Swain Eckert’s flying school with its metal-roofed hangar and offices.

  She had departed with Will from this airport as a bride and returned with Uncle Rowan as a widow. Then came the years when Uncle Rowan, or sometimes Uncle Rowan and Blanche, awaited her inside a glass enclosure separated from the tarmac. After Uncle Rowan’s death, Blanche had waited for Feron at a “gate,” inside an expanding terminal, a
lways under construction.

  Rolling her handsome carry-on bag (a present from Blanche) up the carpeted exit ramp, Feron prepared for the physical reality of the friend who would be awaiting her at her gate.

  As there was no immediate sighting of Merry when Feron emerged through the door, she revised her expectations and began searching the faces of older women craning their necks to spot whomever they’d come to meet. But anyone remotely resembling any of the earlier Merrys she had known was simply not there.

  Was the plane early? No, right on time. What, then? How long should you stay put and wait for the expected one to arrive? Blanche Buttner would be the ideal person to advise on this quandary. (“I’d give her at least ten minutes before you do anything at all. And stay close to the gate you came out of, because that will be where she’s expecting to see you.”)

  There were no pay phones in sight, as most savvy people now traveled with their own little flip-top cell phones. Josie Maglia had been urging her to get one. Having talked Feron into writing the screenplay for Mr. Blue, Josie, who was young enough to be Feron’s daughter, dispensed frequent advice about what the up-to-date Feron was going to need when the new century kicked in.

  A figure was racing toward her. “Feron! Oh, Feron! Thank God!” She had never seen Merry running and was surprised at the boyish straight-ahead-ness of her gait, even in a skirt, unlike the customary female sidekicking. Must be the result of having had a brother to run with.

  “I got completely lost, I thought I heard concourse B but it wasn’t B, it was D. I think I’m losing my hearing. And I got here early so you’d be sure and see me first thing when you came through the door! This airport has turned into a monster. The last time I was here, there wasn’t any such thing as a concourse. Oh, God, Feron, I’m sorry.”

  She was out of breath. Smaller, thinner, enviably well-dressed, beautiful, even with a large band-aid crossing the bridge of her nose.

  “But I’m here and you’re here,” said Feron, embracing her and experiencing the Merry-ness of her. So this was what a human friend felt like: a body thrumming with exertion, warm, damp skin, a remembered smell, a forty-one-year connection zapping between them. “We are both here together in this monster airport. Let’s sit down for a minute and catch our breaths.”