Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  “She’s fallen in love with him,” Merry had said of Mrs. Blue. “But she thinks she would lose her power if she let him know.”

  50

  “Merry, do you remember ‘September Song’?”

  “I loved that song.”

  They sat together on the west porch. So far, the calibrated drug combo seemed to be doing its job; Merry had dressed in slacks and a shirt too loose for her and a silk scarf in place of the bedtime turban. She wore Ritchie’s blue air force blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She was always cold, she said. It was going to be a fine day. A gentle mist rose from the paddock. The horses hadn’t been let out yet.

  “Cuervo said it was on top of the charts when he arrived in New York in 1958.”

  “When we were at Lovegood.”

  “He was just a little older than us, with a book already published in two languages!”

  “That song was …”

  Feron waited for Merry to find her words. Wasn’t waiting what she had come for?

  “… it was sad,” said Merry. “But a good sad.”

  “I know what you mean. How we love our ‘good sad’ stories and songs. But even if it was playing on Our Best to You, you always made us turn off the radio after lights out.”

  “Mmm …”

  Which could have meant “yes, I remember,” or equally could have been a polite acknowledgment that people still bound to life, healthy people like Feron, persisted in bringing up personal anecdotes from the past.

  Often Merry gazed into immeasurable space. As though distancing herself from her surroundings, even from Feron. It must have been that sort of distancing that had made Thad say Merry was all right with whatever happened next. (“But that’s kind of hard on the rest of us.”)

  But then Merry would make a sudden remark about what was going on inside her. Like the day Feron noticed how she was trying to move her right hand, not having much luck.

  “Can I get you something?”

  “No, thank you. I’m writing my book but it’s hard.”

  “What book?”

  “The one about us.”

  “How much have you done?”

  “A good bit.”

  “Can you talk about it?”

  “I do it in short takes, like my notebook vignettes for Miss Petrie.”

  “Which one are you on now?”

  “I move around, so it’s hard to keep track.”

  Feron got to know Merry’s support circle. There was the elegant Lavonne Blake, the undertaker. And her daughter Rachel, who had coached Feron in her Romans 8 reading for Blanche’s funeral. (“Even and unemotional. The words will carry the feeling.”) And Sister Simone, who must be pushing ninety, the one who had made the bandage-turban for Merry. Sister Simone wore colored turbans herself and large hoop earrings, and would sing Merry to sleep if asked. Dedra the surgical nurse was the one Feron asked about medical matters.

  “What exactly is a seizure? Is it like a stroke?”

  “A seizure is caused by a surge of electrical activity in the brain. A disruption of blood circulation in the brain causes a stroke.”

  “Which is worse?”

  “They’re both serious. And a stroke can be followed by a seizure. With Merry, they said it was a stroke and then the seizure.”

  “So it was the stroke that caused the right side to …?”

  “More than likely. A seizure could have done it, too. There’s so much we don’t know for sure. That’s the main thing I’ve taken away from twenty-three years of nursing: there’s so much we don’t know for sure.”

  Corinne had great-grandchildren, embroidered church banners, and baked pineapple upside-down cakes, which she left cooling on the table for anyone who wanted a slice.

  Tabitha, the church organist, also cooked: mac and cheese, which everyone liked, and rice pudding, which was about the only thing Merry would eat.

  As a whole, the group treated Feron like an honored guest, summoned by their beloved Merry. Feron felt sure that Lavonne considered herself Merry’s best friend, but then Feron knew how she tended to insert competition into almost everything.

  Merry had been gazing at her. “You have changed, Feron.”

  “Oh, how?”

  Merry waited for the words she wanted. “You are more … near.”

  “I’ve never heard anything as beautiful as that bird song. What is it?”

  “I think it’s a Carolina wren. Jack would know for sure.”

  Merry’s compromised right hand was moving steadily across her lap.

  “Are you writing your book?” Feron was dying to hear more about that book.

  “Listen, Feron …”

  “Yes?”

  “If you should ever write about a mother losing an infant child, I want you to describe …”

  “Describe …?”

  “Every soul is unique. So, be sure and …”

  Feron waited.

  “Each child is his own gift. Am I making sense?”

  “I think so.”

  “No, I’m not. What I want to tell you is when Paul was just born, when he came out of my body, we looked into each other’s eyes. I knew him for his individual self. It is there from birth … the personality like no other before or after … not just a baby! You understand?”

  “I do.”

  “Try to get that in. It’s important. In case I don’t finish …”

  Merry’s compromised hand was hard at work, but it was a different tempo.

  “Are you writing your book?”

  “I’m going over my list. To see if I’ve left anyone off. Rachel Blake gets a … what’s the polite word for money?”

  “Legacy?”

  “Thank you. Ezekiel gets a church hall. Your aunt Blanche gave me the idea. What can I give you? Please don’t say ‘nothing’ like your cousin Thad.”

  “I’d like to have one of your notebooks, if you’ve kept them.”

  “Take all of them. They’re in a box in the closet of … where you sleep.”

  “I will treasure them.”

  “Something else I wanted to say, but I forgot. It makes me really happy you want my notebooks.”

  51

  The calibrated drug combo had lost its magic. Merry didn’t dress and limp out to the porch anymore. Merry slept. Dedra the surgical nurse told Feron nature was taking its course.

  Upstairs in the old Jellicoe farmhouse, Feron heard worsening moans and violent vomiting in the night. Heard the nurse, a new one, ask shouldn’t they send her back to the hospital, and a scolding voice that sounded like Lavonne’s reciting a list of no-no’s: no 911, no ambulance; call the palliative doctor. Feron heard the phrase “… passes away …” and was about to go down when she heard Merry’s welcome moan. She was still there.

  Next day there was a feeding tube and what they called “the pain pump,” which the patient could press when she’d had enough.

  If she took a walk, Feron stayed within sight and hearing in case they had to summon her back.

  Rachel gave Feron a copy of the list of people Merry wanted at her funeral. With their contact information. Scanning the list, she saw Dean Fox’s name. “I will help you call them,” Feron told Rachel.

  The night sky outside Feron’s window was unusually crowded with stars. How could there be so many more than usual? Feron narrowed her eyes, trying to make sense of these extra stars. They seemed to merge right down into the landscape below. She had acquired patience so she looked and looked until she got it. They were the lighted upstairs windows in the Windbourne houses on the other side of the trees.

  Feron was sitting beside Merry’s bed. Someone was always there. Merry wasn’t asleep, but her eyes were closed.

  A new kind of uncounted time had come to the house. It seemed to stretch itself out and out and out. As she had grown accustomed to doing, Feron tried to match her breaths to Merry’s.

  The eyes opened. Just like the night Feron arrived. “You’re here,” Merry whispered.

  “I�
��m here,” said Feron.

  “This is not delirium.”

  “It’s not delirium.”

  “I know you’re really here.”

  “I’m really here,” Feron said, enclosing her friend’s weakened right hand in both hers. It came to her that this was the way Merry had enclosed her hand in Lovegood’s chapel during those “never, no never forsake” lines of the processional hymn when Merry had probably assumed Feron was thinking of her lost mother, when actually Feron had been grieving and yearning for something she couldn’t name.

  A long, easy silence stretched between them.

  “I remember now …” whispered Merry, “what I forgot to tell you. I love you.”

  “And I love you.”

  January 7, 2001

  Susan Fox, Dean Emerita

  Dinwiddie House

  Dear Feron,

  What to say!

  I will do everything in my power to honor your largesse in memory of Merry. But first I’d better bring you up-to-date on Lovegood news.

  Having survived the turnover of millennia without Armageddon or crashing of computer systems and fizzle of the electric grid and the collapse of civilization, we have now completed the first year of the new century with its bitter election and hanging chads and a contested decision that I fear may reverberate through the decades to come.

  I am still alive and compos mentis, as is my friend Mr. Peeler, whom you met when he escorted me to Merry’s funeral in September of ’99. Mr. Peeler’s wife, our ambitious president, continues outdoing herself with changes and improvements. Lovegood is in the throes of becoming a coed university with an evening division and a new name. The best legal team and the best PR firm are on board for the big turnover scheduled for this coming June. As of September 1, 2001, Lovegood College will open its doors as Horace Lovegood University.

  There were some frenzied murmurings that we should change our motto as well. Was Esse Quam Videri sufficiently “goal-oriented”? We went through a few dicey months while the board considered a new motto worthy of our ambitious new endeavor. A consensus came up with “To Aspire and Achieve” to replace “To Be Rather Than to Seem,” but the Latin version was awkward (“Aspirare et Merere”). At last the foolishness abated after several of our big donors, one a former state senator and one a current one, reminded us that Esse Quam Videri was, and always had been, the state’s motto.

  Winifred Darden often said that the secret of Lovegood’s extraordinary endowment fund could be expressed by the acronym GET: Gratitude, Enclosure, and Tradition. I wonder what she would have said about our name change. Probably something like, “Let’s be thankful they kept ‘Lovegood’ in the title, and we’ve still got our Doric columns and our grateful girls.”

  Which brings me back to your proposed endowment for a lecture series. Mr. Peeler and his son ran the numbers and concluded that with your initial installment alone we could schedule the first Meredith Jellicoe Rakestraw lecture for May of 2002.

  However, I am keeping your proposal and generous check in a drawer until I hear back from you. You might not be as excited about funding a lecture series for Horace Lovegood University.

  I’m glad that your filmmaker is finally satisfied with her early rushes of what is now Mrs. Blue. Mr. Peeler and I looked at Extremadura on the internet. What a lovely unspoiled place. I never knew the Spaniards were big tobacco growers.

  You asked if we had a copy of the Lovegood pageant for a scene in your novel in progress, which led me to explore Winifred Darden’s bountiful preservations. I also found the words to the Daughters and Granddaughters hymn, and some other treasures I thought might interest you. I scanned them all myself. The enclosed CD, as you’ll see, is Mahalia Jackson singing “My God Is Real,” the song Sister Simone sang at Merry’s funeral. Though I can’t send the unforgettable spirit of that day, this should bring back a touch of it. As we were driving back to Lovegood, Mr. Peeler said I must have been a keen judge of girls to have had the foresight to put Merry and you in the same room. I said Winifred and I had talked it out together, and it was part experience and part fate and perhaps an infusion of that undefined substance we sometimes call grace.

  I can’t wait for you to finish what you call your “friendship novel.” I will try my utmost to remain a lucid reader until it’s in my hands.

  (Your filmmaker may be taking a risk with a silent film, but I cheer her on. We could all do with some silence, just sitting back in a dark theater and watching humans living and working and discovering their affinities without any words. How interesting, as you say, that an attempt at a feminist Bluebeard tale should contain a love story beneath it. I like the new title.)

  Let me know how you feel about endowing Horace Lovegood University. If you still want to go ahead, we can get things in motion fairly quickly.

  With warm regards,

  Susan Fox

  Dean Emerita

  Lovegood College

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I thank Professor Bes Stark Spangler for educating me about tobacco, particularly from the point of view of a child who was brought up in the tobacco world when tobacco was still “king,” and has lived into an age in which everyone knows that it kills smokers.

  I thank Evie Preston, who for ten years has given me feedback as I talk out in safety what I haven’t written yet.

  I thank Rob Neufeld, who edited volumes I and II of The Making of a Writer, and is completing The Art of Becoming: Gail Godwin’s Contributions to Literature.

  I thank Robb Forman Dew, who has been the trusted acute reader of my manuscripts in progress for thirty-seven years.

  I thank Moses Cardona, my agent, who reads with his heart and always tells me the truth.

  I thank Nancy Miller, who has edited eight of my books, fiction and nonfiction. This time we not only conversed, but we felt free enough to do a little dance that led us to scenes that otherwise would not appear in this novel.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  GAIL GODWIN is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including the novels Grief Cottage, Flora, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, and Evensong; and Publishing, a memoir. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Woodstock, New York.

  www.gailgodwin.com

  BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

  Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.

  1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA

  BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING, and the Diana logo are trademarks of

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  First published in the United States 2020

  Copyright © Gail Godwin, 2020

  Frontispiece art © Gail Godwin, 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

  ISBN: HB: 978-1-63286-822-0; eBook: 978-1-63286-821-3

  To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

  Bloomsbury books may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at specialmarkets@macmillan.com