Flora

by Gail Godwin

“We didn’t bring a purse!” I knew she meant her little vial of pills, but how could we have brought a purse when the girl behind me had been too young to carry a purse yet? Her voice was fading now, still calling for the purse, leaving me to wake with the knowledge that I had utterly failed to save the person who loved me most.

  Not a dream I could tell Mrs. Jones. I had told her simply that I had waked up one night feeling sad, and then about the hat. The sad part came after I had waked up in Nonie’s bed. It had felt as though my own body had been flung down dismembered in the crater. But Nonie’s bed did the job I could not accomplish for her in the dream, it put me back together. I felt the life flowing from the center of me into all my extremities, and was soon brave enough to turn on the lamp.

  Nonie’s purse was still in its place on the dresser—Mrs. Jones understood it needed to stay there—and I went over to it and took out the vial and shook out one tiny pill and swallowed it. Maybe I would die. I was still enough under the influence of the dream to feel this would be a fitting end for me. I ran back to the bed and lay down, but nothing happened. So I got up again and headed to Nonie’s closet. My own clothes hung inside now, and my shoes were on the floor. Hers were still there in their boxes. She was particular about her shoes and wouldn’t have been caught dead in those old-woman shoes from the dream. She preferred I. Miller pumps, size 8AA, in black or gray, with a three-inch tapered heel and a V-shaped vamp to accommodate her high instep. Her bedroom slippers were always narrow suede Daniel Greens. I checked a few boxes to make sure some evil nighttime thing hadn’t substituted the old-woman shoes.

  Then I took down the shiny new hatbox with the horse-drawn carriages going round and round it. At first I planned just to stroke the hat, but when I carried the box over to the bed and lifted the hat out of its tissues and saw her hatpin in it I felt compelled to sit down in front of the three-way mirror and try it on myself. Experimenting with different angles I found that if I slouched down in a certain way I could visualize how she might have looked if I had been standing behind her in the store.

  XIII.

  I had to flee the kitchen in embarrassment when Flora was inviting Finn to dinner after placing our order. She was going on too long, making it sound like we never had people to dinner—which we never did, but why did she have to tell things like that? I couldn’t stand it anymore when she started discussing the menu with him, making sure he liked pork and of course bringing in the marvelous Juliet, who had discovered how to bathe wartime rations in a wonderful sauce.

  I shut myself in my old room. Its window was brighter for daytime reading, and also I felt I was making amends to it for my abrupt desertion. I lay on top of my old silk baby quilt Brian and I had used for reading, but didn’t open the book yet. Mrs. Jones had brought it from the library when she returned the one I hadn’t finished. This one, Hitty, didn’t look too promising—it was about a doll—but Mrs. Jones had chosen it herself, after consulting with the librarian, and I knew I would have to at least skim enough that I could “report” on it so her feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

  Finn was coming to dinner on Sunday. Flora had invited him for six o’clock. I had heard that much before she started in on how nice for us some company would be and launched into Juliet and the wartime pork. I was reminded afresh that my biggest fear concerning Flora was how her lack of reserve would reflect on our family. How, people would ask, could someone as picky as Principal Anstruther go off and leave his daughter, who had just lost her irreproachable grandmother, with a young woman who didn’t know any better than to read letters from the dead woman to the funeral guests? How exactly was this Flora related to the Anstruther family? Well, she was first cousin to Helen’s mother: the two girls grew up together in Alabama. Oh, her mother, I see.”

  So far, only Lorena Huff had pronounced on Flora as “that emotional girl” who had read the letters, and Father McFall probably had his own reservations after quizzing her during the drive home from church. If Flora would only show more reserve, I could cover for her, but she would babble the most embarrassing things when least expected. It was bad enough when we were alone, but who knew what she might say to Finn?

  At least she had been offered a job and had accepted. What if all three letters had said no? Would my father have felt sorry for her and found it a convenience for himself to keep her on? After having given it some careful thought, I no longer dreaded he might marry her. He was too critical, she wasn’t his type, he would always be rolling his eyes and leaving the table and carrying fresh drinks up to his room. The idea of them sharing a room was preposterous. But my father was perfectly capable of keeping her with us to serve his needs. She could cook. (When I finally came around to admitting that Flora cooked better than Nonie, it made me think less of cooking.) My father would teach her to drive Nonie’s car and it would be Flora who picked me up from school. Lorena Huff would be right, after all: I would have a live-in governess.

  But now it wasn’t going to happen because Flora had a job and she had written to accept and they were going to send her the schoolbooks and schedules so she could start planning. She would be gone from Old One Thousand the last week in August and my father would be back with his burnt grilled cheese sandwiches and his cocktails, complaining about his job kowtowing to small-town faculty egos and waiting to be replaced by some younger man with connections.

  And why should I care about what Finn thought of Flora? From the beginning he had been “my” person, someone I had connected to before Flora flew out of the house. I looked ahead to more conversations when he would ask me about my thoughts and to future adventures when he would teach me more things and praise me for my bravery. Yet I was sophisticated enough already to perceive that he was something of an outcast type himself. He had admitted to mental problems (I was eager to hear more about those), and if you looked at him critically, as someone like my father would certainly do, he was a little ridiculous, with his sharp, pointy features and orange spikes of hair and skinny body, dancing a jig in a hole in the woods. And on the motorcycle, when I had held him around his waist and laid my face against his damp back, his rank male smell made me screw up my nostrils.

  My father liked to trap people in epithets. Brian was Little Lord Fauntleroy and Annie was Lady Uncouth. Nonie’s stepbrother, in tears at the funeral home because he couldn’t “see Honora,” was the Old Mongrel. What would my father’s epithet for Finn be?

  Nonie preferred an indirect approach to judgment. “Is she the kind of person we’d like to invite to dinner?” she had asked my father on the evening he brought home the girls’ hygiene booklet Miss Waring said she could not teach. What would Nonie have said about Finn? I couldn’t hear her initiating a dinner invitation, but suppose Flora had said to her as Flora had said to me, “Maybe we should ask him to dinner, or would that be wrong?” Nonie would have responded exactly as I had done (this realization cheered me): she would have first asked, “Why would it be wrong?” This response, I now understood, would have given her more time to think about the rest of her reply. And what would that have been? Here I drew a blank, though in time I would become so proficient at channeling Nonie’s responses that they would become inseparable from mine. Or rather, from what mine would have been if I hadn’t had Nonie inside ready to speak for me before I knew what I wanted to say.

  But still, I was impatient to see Finn on Sunday. If only I could be sure Flora would not ruin everything with her eagerness and disregard for what should be left unsaid.

  In the new library book, a doll was writing a memoir of her first hundred years. I had to remind myself that Mrs. Jones’s Rosemary had still been in the doll-playing stage when she died of diphtheria. The librarian had told Mrs. Jones that all the books in the series I liked were checked out and said this doll one was suitable for readers through the age of twelve. If all the books in my series about girls and houses with mysteries were checked out, the fickle librarian must have been recommending them to other people besides me.

  I
leafed through the illustrations again, the first one of the doll (Hitty) taking up a quill pen to begin her memoir. Hitty had a square face, a thick neck, goggle eyes, and an ill-natured smile. I had been able to deduce from the chapter titles (“In Which I Travel,” “In Which I Am Lost in India”) that this was one of those books grown-ups dote on because it sneak-feeds young minds with plenty of history and geography.

  I heard the phone ring, but it couldn’t be my father because he called in the evening. Maybe it was Finn calling back to say he couldn’t come on Sunday. I imagined him hanging up the phone at the store and thinking, I can never get through a dinner with that excitable woman who sounds desperate to have company. If it was just Helen and me it would be different.

  Flora was knocking at my door (at least someone had taught her to knock). “Helen, it’s for you.”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s your friend Annie. Why don’t you talk to her on the upstairs phone? I’ve got things to do in the kitchen and you’ll have your privacy.”

  “She doesn’t sound so bad,” said Annie as soon as Flora had hung up downstairs.

  “Oh, Annie.” My sigh spoke volumes.

  “Just thought I should let you know I’m leaving town this afternoon.”

  “This afternoon!”

  “They’re cutting the phone off in a few minutes, and I didn’t want you to call me up and hear ‘That number has been disconnected.’ Not that you have called me up a single time.”

  “I didn’t realize you were leaving so soon!”

  “I guess time runs differently up there at Shangri-la. I said three weeks, and it’ll be three weeks on Monday.” There was a frosty tone beneath her usual teasing.

  “Oh, Annie, things have been so— Oh, I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything, Helen. Actually, I called to say a few things to you.”

  “What?”

  “Remember our lemon squeezes? You would tell me what I did that really bothered you and then it would be my turn to tell you. One time you told me I chewed with my mouth open.”

  “We haven’t done a lemon squeeze since third grade.”

  “No, but I remembered it and I make sure nobody sees the inside of my mouth anymore. In fact, I was having a moment of gratitude toward you just now because when I’m making my new friends in the flatlands I’ll know not to do it. So, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, but—?”

  “So I’ve decided to do you a favor and tell you a few lemon-truths before I ride out of your life forever.”

  Where was this heading?

  “I don’t have long, so here goes. Mammy saw Mrs. Huff downtown and Mrs. Huff said your behavior had really hurt them.”

  “My behavior! What did I do?”

  “It’s not so much what you did as what you didn’t do. You stayed in their house for a whole week. You slept in Rachel’s room and swam in her pool for an entire week and haven’t called her since. You never even sent a thank-you note.”

  Oh, God, I hadn’t. Counterattack was my only defense. “Have you always remembered to send thank-you notes?”

  “It’s not your turn, Helen. I haven’t finished. You were always—” She stopped and then made a new start. “You’re smart, Helen, and I used to consider you my best friend, but your trouble is you think you’re better than other people. Mrs. Huff told Mammy that you got it from your grandmother. Who we all know went around with her nose stuck up so high a bird could have pooped in it.”

  “Mrs. Huff said that?”

  “The bird-poop part was me, but the rest was her.”

  “That’s not fair! She’s dead!”

  “Yes, and you’ve got a few more months of people feeling sorry for you. But after that, you’d better take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror.”

  I could hardly breathe I was so hurt, but something told me to snatch what lemon-truths I could out of her before she rode out of my life forever. “What do you think is wrong with me?”

  “What do I think? Well, it so happens I’ve thought a lot about it. Other people don’t exist when you’re not with them. We’re like toys or something. You play with them and examine them and then you put them on a shelf and go away. We don’t have lives, we’re just your playthings.”

  Was this true? The idea struck home somehow. Yet there was something satisfying about others thinking of me like that. It put me out of the zone where I could get hurt.

  Flora-like, my own eyes were leaking. Among other things, I felt I had not defended Nonie as she deserved.

  “Listen,” said Annie, “Mammy is hovering, saying I have to get off the phone so they can disconnect it. Are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was I too harsh?”

  “No, you were just being … lemony.”

  “I really liked you, Helen. It’s just that—”

  “I’m going to hang up now, Annie. Good luck with your new friends. And remember to keep your mouth closed when you chew.”

  I hung up quietly and sat for some minutes at the wobbly little phone desk in the upstairs hall. It had been in the same spot ever since I could remember, though the phone models had changed. I was glad she was leaving town. She wouldn’t be around to blab her findings to anyone else.

  But Mrs. Huff would. She was probably standing on some street corner right now, waiting to tell another mother about my bad behavior. If Nonie had been alive, I would have written the thank-you note and I would have written to Brian before Father McFall forced me into it. It was true I had been counting on people feeling sorry for me and overlooking my lapses because I had lost my grandmother.

  I could hear Flora downstairs (she sounded as though she was in the living room) humming “Begin the Beguine” in breathless, hopping snatches, while she scrubbed something with a brush. What had she found to scrub that Mrs. Jones hadn’t already scrubbed?

  All the unoccupied rooms were left open to keep them, Mrs. Jones said, from getting that shut-up smell. (“Empty rooms need to breathe so they can stay connected to the rest of the house.”)

  The doors to the two front rooms, my father’s and Flora’s, were closed. I suppose Mrs. Jones felt that my father, as living head of the household, occupied the Hyman Highsmith room in spirit even though he was away at Oak Ridge. This was the room my father and mother had shared. It had its own porch entrance, to the south porch, just as Flora’s Willow Fanning room had its own porch entrance to the west porch.

  I entered my father’s room, which smelled of furniture polish. It was the barest room in the house. After some recent falls from too much Jack Daniel’s, he had rolled up the handsome Persian area rugs and bestowed them on the two lesser Recoverers’ rooms. That left the bed that he and my mother had slept in and the bookcase he had made and an old Victorian flattop desk he had found at a sale and refinished. The bookcase held only books about carpentry or furniture and was more empty than full. Mrs. Jones had outdone herself on the bare wood in this room because there was more of it here than anything else. Trophies from my father’s public life were on display at the other end of the hall, in Doctor Cam’s old consulting room, which Nonie had made into a family shrine room. Harry’s college diploma was in a frame next to my grandfather’s medical credentials. His bound senior thesis in history (“The Decline of Southern Honor After Appomattox”) leaned against Doctor Cam’s bound volume of handwritten poems (“midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this December morn / a boy is born”). The family photos were also in the shrine room (a stiff-looking Nonie in long skirts holding the newborn Harry, a studio portrait of a younger Doctor Cam before he met Nonie, Lisbeth and Harry and Nonie on my parents’ wedding day, and lots of me in all my stages to date. There was this one photo of my mother in a fur coat squatting beside me in my snowsuit. She looked strained by her squatting position but determined to pose like a mother enjoying the snow with her child.

  “Isn’t it about time,” Nonie had cheerfully suggested to my father
not so long ago, “we started calling the Hyman Highsmith room the Harry Astruther room? You’ve been living in it, except for college, since you were sixteen.”

  “Oh, let’s keep it the Hyman Highsmith room,” my father had said. “Harry Anstruther doesn’t live in it.”

  “Then who does, pray tell?”

  “You tell me.”

  Downstairs, Flora, still erupting little snatches of “Begin the Beguine,” was scrubbing something more distant than whatever she had been scrubbing before. I had no hesitation in crossing the hall and entering her room. I had done this in imagination already and had progressively worked out the kinks in my plan. I opened the top drawer. The packet of letters now faced downward and the ribbon that bound them was looser than it had been when I first saw her place them in the drawer. She must have been reading them. I was able to slide the face-down top letter from its envelope without disturbing the ribbon. When you are doing something behind someone’s back, you feel slightly cheated if they make it too easy. You may even feel they deserve it. Heart thudding, I quietly let myself out of her room, crossed the hall, reentered my father’s room, closing the door, and went outside to the south porch. Shut off twice, I felt twice protected.

  I read the letter standing at the rail, which was prickly with peeled paint. It took me several tries before I calmed down enough to register what was in it. It was clearly Nonie’s first reply in the famous correspondence, which meant Flora probably kept the letters in chronological order, with the first one at the bottom. I was disappointed. Nonie didn’t come through as strong and wise as I had expected, and what she conveyed was more confusing than enlightening. I was mentioned only once, at the very end—almost like a dutiful afterthought.

  I couldn’t wait to retrace my furtive route and get the thing back in its envelope, though I resolved to read more of the letters whenever opportunities arose. Meanwhile I would be thinking up ways to make those opportunities.