Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  “I certainly won’t make it about myself.”

  “Although some of what you said about your friend you will recognize in Aelred’s treatise on friendship.”

  46

  jellicoe@aol.com

  to Feron Hood

  April 6, 1999, 6:30 P.M.

  Dear Feron,

  You are still in the air. This time yesterday you were here. Today’s daylight is close to yesterday’s daylight, so if I wanted to play unwise games with myself, I would imagine you suddenly appearing down at the paddock, making friends with the horses, or sitting on the west porch with Rachel Blake rehearsing Romans 8. I say “unwise,” because I’ve done this before, picking a scene and then trying to bring Ritchie back into it. The imaginer always runs smack into the barrier between what is and what isn’t and goes to pieces. I never tried it with little Paul, though I once dreamed of Ritchie carrying him in his arms. You are still very much alive. Why shouldn’t we end up tottering together into the middle of the next millennium? One thing I know for sure, we will never run out of things to say.

  Merry left her desk to answer the phone. It was the dermatologist.

  “We got it all on the nose, but there’s something else. I want to send you back to Duke for a scan—what time is good for you?”

  “Has the melanoma come back?”

  “It’s a new site. Let’s just pray this one’s contained.”

  Merry returned to her keyboard, deleted most of her message, added a few lines, and pressed “send.”

  Dear Feron,

  You are still in the air. This time yesterday you were here. Your visit was lovely. Please come again. I don’t think we will ever run out of things to say to each other.

  Love,

  Merry

  The treetops were tossing and the sky had gone gray. Across the field, Alda was clapping her hands to call in the horses. Merry went out and stood on the west porch and let the wind whip at her skirt. She had not changed out of her funeral dress. Miss Petrie had taught them a literary term for when the weather in a story serves as a comment on what a character is feeling, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

  When compiling a list of all the ways she could lose Thad, she had overlooked the possibility that she might be the one to exit first. After he had seen her through the last cancer, the next awful “what if?” that popped up was, “What if Thad, who is six years older, goes first?”

  47

  Shaken by their interview with Jocelyn Williams, Lavonne Blake and Merry Jellicoe sat down in Merry’s little office at the funeral home to pull themselves together.

  Merry said, “I’m glad this state allows two people to be buried in the same casket.”

  “Yes, as long as they can fit. Daddy buried a husband and wife once, but I remember him saying, ‘If that man had one more inch on him, we couldn’t have squeezed him in.’ In our case one of them was less than a day old. She will fit nicely in her mother’s arms.”

  “The resilience of the human spirit—doesn’t it amaze you, Lavonne? Mrs. Williams went out of here with a spring in her step because she had a living purpose. To choose their clothes.”

  “It couldn’t have been easy for her,” Lavonne said, “taking those photos.”

  “Jack and I did that. It was only moments after Paul stopped breathing. His skin was still pink and warm.”

  “Oh, Merry, I’m sorry, I didn’t even think …”

  “No, it’s fine. We were glad we had the photo … well, eventually we were. And it’s a good thing when you can draw on your own experience to understand somebody else’s pain. What was especially strong of her was to get to the neonatal unit and take the picture while the baby was still alive. Then she had to go back to the delivery room and take a picture of her dead daughter.”

  “They weren’t very successful pictures, but there’s enough to go on. We’ll have a professional photographer do shots of mother and infant at the viewing.”

  “If we could get those shots even an hour before the viewing, I could scan them into the program.”

  “What a good idea!”

  “Before you go below, Lavonne, I’d like to run a couple of things past you.”

  “You look serious.”

  “It is serious, but it’s also okay in the scheme of things, I promise. The melanoma has come back. Or rather this one’s a new one. This time it’s taken up residence in my brain.”

  “Merry, you said this was going to be okay!”

  “I meant in the larger scheme of things it will be, either way. You of all people should understand that. The drill is pretty much like last time. Only, because of where it is, I’m going to be fitted for a radiation mask. I’m trying to think positive. There’s a chance you’ll be stuck with me for years more, until I’m an ancient crone.”

  “May it please the Lord we stay friends though our crone years. Meanwhile, just like last time, you can count on me.”

  “I know I can. Right up to the end and after the end, if it comes to that. No wait, I meant it when I said it will be okay either way. What I’m thankful for is, well, my mother and father never got a chance to plan, my brother, Ritchie, never got a chance to plan, either. The funeral I took Feron to last week was for a lady who’d had time to plan everything. A complete Catholic funeral mass, with directions for which people she wanted for the readings and for the pallbearers. There were to be no eulogies and no sermon. Just the funeral mass. She gave away furniture, left money for the church to build a new food hall. She had no heirs, so she left her house with some of the best furniture in trust to the town of Benton Grange, to use for community events. As you know, my funeral directions are already in your files and my will is at the bank, and stone is already prepared, except for the closing date.”

  “Oh, Merry, you make it sound like you’re planning a big party.”

  “Well I am, in a way. I’m thankful I have a chance to plan. There’s one more thing, Lavonne. This has to stay strictly between us. Not even Rachel can know.”

  “Strictly between us. But what about Feron? Aren’t you going to tell her?”

  “Yes, she made me promise I would, but I’m going to wait until I think it’s time.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “I’ll wait until I know more … till I see how it goes.”

  48

  Feron was calculating. The three-year rental contract with Thad’s son, Simon, would end in 2002, the year she turned sixty. Then she would either sell Uncle Rowan’s house or go and live in it. But she would keep and sublet the beach house to give herself the option of fleeing back to it should poky little Pullen make her crazy. If the stairs of the beach house became too much for her, she would sell—the men on the fourth floor said the value had skyrocketed since Cuervo bought it in the seventies. She would buy some small apartment and continue to take her daily walk up and down Fifth, like the lady with the gray gloves. Only she wouldn’t have to stop anyone and ask for bus fare home. Feron still had a hard time picturing herself as old, except when she had to depend on others.

  fhood@aol.com

  to Merry Jellicoe

  May 13, 1999

  Dear Merry,

  I felt close to you today. I went over to Josie’s loft to watch a Spanish tourism documentary I was dreading, but it showed tobacco farmers in Extremadura bringing in the harvest and gave me an insight into your life’s work and the work of your forebears. Having you in the middle of things made the documentary tender and meaningful. I saw how Ritchie would have straddled those rafters, and you when you were young checking through the fresh-cut leaves for “lugs.” Spain is a huge producer of tobacco, and the season in Extremadura is the same as yours because the two of you are within three degrees latitude of each other, and their harvest begins in mid-August. Josie has this bee in her bonnet about filming parts of the harvest and then finding some ancient farmhouse for the setting of Mr. Blue. She wants me to go with her, even though I’m not writing the screenplay anymore. No one is at th
e moment. I will have to get a new passport.

  I tried your exercise of taking off from a Chekhov title to break in my new laptop, but “A Woman’s Kingdom” was a train wreck. I based my tale on a lady in Pullen who is a world-class doll collector. Ask Thad to tell you about her. First I tried it from her point of view, and it was tedious. Then I tried it from the point of view of the “visitor” (me) whom she invites upstairs to see her “more personal” dolls, and it was tediously bizarre.

  Haven’t heard from you recently. But now I can picture you in your beautiful surroundings. You were right when you said we will never run out of things to say. Recently I have been trying to imagine old age in Pullen. I think together we might face it with aplomb, but it would be impossible without you.

  Love,

  Feron

  49

  August 1999

  Feron had locked her door and was halfway down the first set of stairs to drop off her key with her friends on the fourth floor before taking the elevator the rest of the way. She heard the phone ring three times followed by the automated male voice: “Please leave a message after the tone.”

  “Feron, please pick up. This is Thad. I’m afraid Merry—”

  She left her suitcase on the landing and raced back upstairs. She must have stored this scene into her reveries of the future. It seemed she had experienced it multiple times and could predict all her thoughts and responses.

  He was still talking when she picked up.

  “What?”

  “Feron, you’re there.”

  “I would have been on the elevator and out of reach in another five minutes.”

  “Did you hear any of what I said?”

  “I was trying not to because I knew you were going to have to say it again. What’s happened with Merry?”

  “They were doing whole brain radiation at Duke, and she had a seizure on the operating table.”

  “Is she alive?”

  “She’s home again. She’s able to speak, but her right side …”

  “Damn it, she promised to tell me!”

  “I’m calling because she has asked me to tell you now.”

  “Five more minutes and I wouldn’t have heard the phone! I was on my way to the airport to fly to Spain.”

  “Which airport?”

  “Kennedy.”

  “Well, I’ve booked you an afternoon flight from Newark. It’s the same flight as you took last time for Blanche.”

  “Are you saying she’s about to die?”

  “It’s more like”—he broke off to collect himself—“that she’s all right with whatever’s going to happen next. But that’s kind of hard on the rest of us.”

  Josie, waiting with a taxi below, had been remarkably practical. If she was let down, she didn’t show it.

  “What will you do about your ticket?”

  “I’ll just have to forfeit it.”

  “No, when I check in, I’ll explain for you. You’ll probably get a refund. Eventually.”

  “Well, at least I had a bag already packed.”

  “A forty-one-year-old friendship is a lot older than me.”

  Thad was waiting at the gate, which brought back Merry, last spring, racing toward her, running like a boy. (“Oh, God, Feron, I’m sorry!”)

  Thad held her. He smelled of some agreeable masculine scent. What a dear, good man. Her first cousin.

  “When did this happen, Thad?”

  “End of June.”

  “June! It’s the middle of August!”

  “Everything got kind of turned around. More hospital. More scans. Some rehab. She was on the up and up, could put weight on her right leg but couldn’t use the right hand yet, then they took another scan, found more tumors in other places, and that’s when she … well, I won’t say gave up hope, but started looking at a new ending. Back in May you wrote that you were going to Spain and she wanted to be sure you got to do everything you needed to do over there before she gave me the okay to ask you to come down here.”

  “I would have come sooner if I’d known.”

  “I know you would have.”

  During the drive, Thad brought her up-to-date. “She has an incredible support circle. The women from her church have organized themselves to take care of everything. And she has what they call a palliative care doctor, who phones every day and adjusts her meds as required. A calibrated combo of stimulants and painkiller and, I believe, steroids. To decrease fatigue and make her sharper. She has her plans all in place for while you’re here. How long will you be staying?”

  “As long as I’m wanted.”

  “Better tell her that. Be prepared for her sleeping a lot. She’s lucid pretty much most of the time, but she sometimes has to search for words. And she’ll suddenly leave you and drift off to a place you can’t go. Oh, and she wears this bandage in bed to protect the back of her head from touching the pillow. A wonderful old lady from her church fashioned it into a sort of turban. Before I forget, my son, Simon, is so pleased with your house. He says if you ever want to sell—”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s what I told him.”

  “Have they set a date?”

  “They’ve broken it off.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “It’s okay. It’s always been a sort of irresolute business. She wanted to be married, and he felt he was in too far to get out.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “No. Lou and I never wavered. Nothing could have stopped us. I snatched her out of junior college to follow me into the navy, and now forty years later she’s becoming an arborist up at State. She has a nice little apartment there.”

  “What exactly does an arborist do?”

  “Takes care of trees. When we returned home, she had her parents’ house moved to a big field in the country, and we planted all these young trees, which started dying, but she was hell-bent on saving them. Now they are big, beautiful shade trees, and she’s gone off to study how to save other people’s trees for lots of money. I had my main career first, and she’s having hers now. A person can lead sequential lives. In a long marriage, you can watch your partner in the act of morphing into someone new.”

  “Ah, I wouldn’t know. I wonder if Will and I would have become sequential people.”

  “Feron, I’ve been wanting to ask you something if it’s not too painful.”

  “Ask away.”

  “When you lost Will, how did you manage to carry on? You really loved him, Merry says.”

  “It happened so fast. One minute I was in our apartment waiting for him to come back from one of his walks, and the next minute I learned that he had fallen off a cliff. I suppose I owe my carrying on to Uncle Rowan. He came over to England and took care of things, and then I stayed with Blanche for six months. It took a while to get my bearings. In a way, I’m still getting them. It takes … Thad?”

  Hunched over the steering wheel, Thad was sobbing.

  “Why don’t you pull off the road for a minute?”

  “Good idea. I’m sorry, Feron. It’s just that … how will I manage to go on without her in this world?”

  Okay, so now I know for sure, thought Feron. He wants me to know for sure.

  She took her first cousin in her arms, allowed him to cry himself out in the car, and then they continued on.

  “The day nurse is at the end of her shift,” Thad informed her. “The night nurse comes on at seven. As soon as I take you to her, I’m going to head home. I still sleep at home nights.”

  Merry lay, apparently asleep, in a raised hospital bed in Ritchie’s room. The carefully wrapped turban reminded Feron of the scarf Merry had worn low on her forehead to their lunch at the Neuse River Café. The nurse on duty left Feron sitting beside her friend. Her anxiety over how she might find Merry faded. Merry was smaller and bone-thin, her face pale but not gray or anything. She wore ironed pajamas, which Feron bet anything had once belonged to Ritchie. She was simply grateful to sit quietly beside her sleeping friend
, matching her breaths to Merry’s.

  At last the eyes opened. “I was dreaming you were here,” Merry whispered.

  “I am here. Can I touch you?”

  “My right side is not …” Merry reached her left hand across to grasp Feron’s. “How long can you …?”

  “I can stay as long as you want.”

  “But your harvest?”

  “What? Oh, the one in Spain? I can see it in the film later. Maybe we’ll watch it together.”

  “Maybe …” The eyes closed again.

  This time Feron was given the upstairs bedroom, formerly Merry and Jack’s. Outside the late sun was still strong. From this window you could see it beating down on the silvery rooftops of the new development. Oak-something. Feron hated it when her memory played hard to get, which was happening more often these days. The recently planted trees were still too young to hide the roofs and upper stories. Feron squinted and tried to replace the houses with the grand old tobacco fields she had never seen.

  (“All around you, nothing but fields …”

  “If I had made that Christmas visit, in 1958, how would it have looked?”

  “All plowed under by then. But a horizon of loamy soil holding up the sky. I don’t know if I saw the grandeur back then. I saw it as a lot of acres and a lot of responsibility.”)

  In mid-August, the golden leaves in those former fields would now be ripe and ready for harvest as far as the eye could see, like the picture on the cover of the state magazine with Merry’s Stephen Slade piece inside.

  Josie still had several hours before her flight to Spain. One day in the future, Feron would sit in a darkened room and be shown waving Spanish leaves being harvested, and a man and a woman in an ancient farmhouse working out a mode of existence.

  She realized she was counting on Josie to redeem her misbegotten Mr. Blue, or at least shine some fresh light on it. Will said medieval artists strove to copy or embellish an old subject. (“Making something original was not at all what they were aiming for.”)