Flora

by Gail Godwin

  November 4, 1938

  Dear Flora,

  Your news has distressed us. My heart goes out to you. It is a terrible thing to lose a parent and all the more devastating when you only have the one to lose. In the short time we were with your father, it was clear how much he loved you and looked out for you.

  Of course I don’t mind your writing to me. The truth is we have been worrying and wondering ever since you left. We never heard from you after the week you stayed with us following Lisbeth’s funeral.

  Yes, it is doubly hard for you, as you said, to have lost the two people you loved most within a single year. Though it has been almost a year since Lisbeth’s death, I am still fairly reeling from the loss of her. You had her when you were a child and I had her when I was old enough to be her mother. But she was more than “like a daughter” to me. She was the better, cooler young woman I wished I had been, and I loved watching her grow in self-confidence. She was one of those people who flourish best under a certain amount of protection, and I like to think we provided her with that protection. Lisbeth and I were not demonstrative women, but we treasured each other’s company and admired each other. I had things to teach her and she had things to teach us. I miss her more than I can say.

  It wasn’t kind for those girls at school to say you should just tell people your father died of “lead poisoning.” Of course, as you say, it was in the papers and everyone knew about the card game and the shooting. But you know, Flora, in future when you meet people all you need to say is that your father died when you were fifteen. That is enough.

  Harry joins me in sending his deepest sympathy, and little Helen would, too, if she were old enough to understand. She is my joy and my responsibility now.

  Do write to me whenever you feel like it. I will always reply.

  Yours truly,

  Honora Anstruther

  XIV.

  Flora and I argued about everything on the Sunday that Finn was expected for dinner.

  “I’m making those cheese straws you like,” Flora said, “and a pitcher of lemonade for when we are sitting in the living room getting acquainted. How does that sound?”

  “We always offer cocktails to our company,” I said. “Even Father McFall has his gin and limewater. And my father always has his drink before dinner.”

  “Or drinks,” said Flora.

  “You shouldn’t criticize my father.”

  “Well, I’m not, honey. It was just a statement of fact.”

  Then it was how we were going to serve the meal. Flora wanted us to help our plates in the kitchen so the food would stay hot.

  “Why can’t you serve the plates in the kitchen and bring them to us at the table. That way, things would stay just as hot.”

  “Well, if you think—”

  “It would be more elegant that way,” I said.

  Then there was the matter of where Finn should sit. “He should sit on your left, Helen. You’ll be head of the table as always.”

  “But the guest of honor always sits on the right.”

  “Well, but on your left he’ll get the view of the sunset over the mountains. On your right, it’ll just be the wall.”

  I could tell she had given a lot of thought to this and felt I should give in, especially since I had gotten my way about her serving the plates, which was how I had been picturing it.

  Then there was the fuss over what each of us should wear. “My good suit seems too dressy, especially when I have to tie an apron over it.”

  “Just wear one of your regular dresses,” I said.

  “Or I could wear that nice skirt, the one Juliet made from your mother’s dress, with a simple blouse—”

  “No! Just one of your regular dresses.”

  “What about you, Helen? Have you decided?”

  “I’ll wear the dress I wore to church. I like it.” It was one of the last dresses Nonie had bought for me: a small blue and white check with a white piqué collar that had a single red emblem on it like Chinese writing.

  “Well, that’s the main thing, isn’t it? A person wants to feel comfortable.”

  But when I stepped into the dress and started to button it up the front, there was a nasty surprise. It wasn’t exactly that I had started sprouting new parts, but when I forced the top button, I looked like a little girl who had outgrown her dress. But I had worn it to church. How could this have happened? Cursing Flora and all her tasty meals, I tore the dress off and stuffed it into the darkest corner of the closet, behind Nonie’s shoe boxes, and, after some exasperating wrong choices, settled on a plaid pleated skirt and school blouse.

  Finn, wearing a suit, roared up on his delivery cycle on the dot of six. He looked kind of weakened without his paratrooper boots, and there was something about his hair that made him resemble a puppy run through a bath. He’d brought us flowers from the farmers’ market, which Flora made a great deal of ceremony about arranging in a vase, and as he passed through our kitchen he said the aroma was enough to make a man swoon. His feet in civilian shoes were small and dainty, like a dancing master’s. How sad that all of us had gone to so much trouble and none of us looked as good as we usually did. Flora had obeyed me and worn an unobjectionable dress, but she had done something extra with her makeup that made her eyes and mouth too sultry.

  The cheese straws and the lemonade awaited us in the living room.

  “Now, Helen tells me cocktails are always offered to company in this house,” Flora said, “so, honey, what are his choices?” Though she was honoring my wishes, she also managed to make it sound like a concession to a child.

  “Ah, thank you, no,” Finn said before I could begin my recitation. “I’ve been on the dry ever since my little set-to with the lungs. However, that lemonade looks grand.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “we’d get a Recoverer who’d just been cured of TB and was dying for a drink. My grandfather said this was a tricky proposition.”

  “Oh, why was that?” asked Finn, interested.

  “Because the drink was like a reward but it might be just the thing to start him down the road to having to be cured of something else.”

  Accepting his glass of lemonade, Finn laughed and looked at me admiringly. “Were all the Recoverers men?”

  “Oh no,” Flora jumped in. “For instance, my room, the room I’m staying in for the summer, is called the Willow Fanning room. I don’t know much about Willow Fanning, but Helen’s grandmother told me she was quite a handful for such a delicate person and they came to regret taking her in.”

  “When did she tell you that?” I demanded.

  “It was probably in one of her letters,” said Flora. “Or, no, I seem to remember her saying something the first time I stayed in that room.” To Finn she explained, “The first time was when I came up for Lisbeth’s funeral. Lisbeth was Helen’s mother. We were raised together in Alabama, Helen’s mother and I. Lisbeth was twelve years older, but we were real close.”

  “He doesn’t want to hear all that,” I said.

  “I do, I do,” Finn insisted. “I find your whole setup fascinating. You two cousins up here on your private hill. And those Recoverers! You make me wish I were one of them.”

  “Oh, they were long before our time,” said Flora.

  “Yet she speaks of them as though they’re still in residence,” said Finn. “If I had been one of them, Helen, do you think they would have named a room after me?”

  “The Devlin Patrick Finn room,” I tried it out.

  “Oh, what a beautiful name,” cried Flora. “Why didn’t you tell me that, Helen? I wish someone had given me a middle name.”

  “We can give you one now,” said Finn warmly, leaning forward to touch her on the arm. “What name do you fancy?”

  But his sudden intimacy seemed to fluster Flora and, murmuring that she’d need to consider it, she fled to the kitchen to check on something.

  The living room was filling with a nostalgic orange light, which made everything look less shabby and more
historical. You couldn’t see the snags on the arms of the yellow silk sofa, which Finn had been sharing with Flora. The carpet was a warm blur of soft-patterned flowers and not a mange of threadbare spots. The windows were open to the sunset in progress and a gentle breeze ruffled the sheer curtains. The scrubbing sounds I had heard the other day, I now realized, had been Flora’s washing the insides of the windowsills.

  I had chosen Nonie’s wing chair for myself and was gazing demurely down at my lap because I thought Finn was studying me, but it turned out he was looking at the little painting that hung above my chair.

  “Did one of you do that?” he asked.

  “No, it was one of the Recoverers,” I said, and went on to quote Nonie: “Starling Peake let us down, but he was happy the day he painted that picture.” I explained that it was the view from our house before it got blocked out.

  “You could have it back, the view,” Finn said. “All ye’d need to do is top some trees.”

  “It would cost a lot of money,” I said.

  “That would depend on who you got to do it. I might be able to help you.”

  “I would have to ask my father,” I said, like an ungrateful little prig.

  “Well, of course, naturally you would,” Finn replied sportingly, though he blushed with embarrassment.

  I was relieved when Flora stood over us, taking charge like an adult and directing us to our seats. “I will bring your plates from the kitchen,” she announced, rosy with her cooking, “so that everything will stay as hot as possible.”

  Greed rose in my throat at the sight of the steaming food on the plate, but this was immediately followed by dismay at the recent image of myself pooching out of my favorite dress. Flora had been stealthily turning me into a fatty with her meals. Unless I was vigilant and changed my habits, my father wouldn’t recognize me when he came home. Finn ate like a hungry man who had been taught not to bolt his food. He praised each item and asked Flora how she managed to have everything including the biscuits come out at the same time, and that, unfortunately, set off an accolade to the person who had taken Flora in hand when she could hardly reach the stove and taught her everything about cooking. It was Juliet Parker this and Juliet that, until I felt I needed to put in that this was their colored maid back in Alabama.

  “No, not our maid,” said Flora. “Juliet lived with us. She raised me and Helen’s mother. She was a full member of the household. Why, she’s even—”

  “Where do you live, Finn?” I interrupted like a rude child, but it was better than having Flora say what I was sure was coming next: that Juliet Parker was part owner of their house.

  “I live in an attic storeroom above Mr. Crump’s store. Its washing facilities leave much to be desired, but it’s convenient to the job. They only charge me for linens and utilities, so I can put away a bit.”

  “What about your American parents? Will you ever go back to them?”

  “That’s a lot of questions, honey,” Flora mildly protested.

  “No, no, I don’t mind,” said Finn. “You two have told me something about your lives and now it’s my turn. I get on very well with Grace and Bill. Sure they would love to have me back. Bill would make me a partner in his auto parts business, but I’d like to try my wings first. I’m twenty-two—”

  “We’re the same age!” cried Flora. “When is your birthday? Mine was May.”

  “Ah, mine was last November, and there’s already the next one looking over my shoulder, so I’d better get cracking.”

  “How will you try your wings?” I asked, keeping to the subject.

  “I’d like to study engineering or maybe industrial arts.”

  “And you’ve got the GI Bill!” cried Flora. “The government will send you to college.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure of that,” said Finn. “We’ll have to see how things fall out.”

  “But it’s a sure thing,” insisted Flora. “I know several boys in Birmingham who are going to take advantage of it as soon as they’re discharged.”

  “But, you see, I’m already discharged. Because of the lung …” Finn tapped his chest. “And then I developed this other complication.” He tapped the side of his head. “Which made me act a bit daft for a while. They dealt with it out at the hospital, but I have to stay here in town and see a doctor out at the hospital once a week until he says I’m my old self again.”

  “Was that your mental problem?” I asked.

  “Helen, honey—” began Flora.

  “It’s all right,” Finn assured her. “It happens to a lot of soldiers. Meanwhile, this mountain air is good for me, and I get to know people like yourselves. How would I ever have met the two of you if I hadn’t been your deliverer?”

  The phone rang. “Excuse me,” I said, getting up. “That’s probably my father. I’ll take it in the kitchen.”

  “May I speak with Helen?” a voice asked faintly. It was Brian Beale.

  “This is Helen.”

  “Oh. You sound different. I thought it was that lady who’s living with you now.”

  “She’s not living with us, just staying till my father comes back. Where are you?”

  “Oh, I’m home. But I have to go away again tomorrow.”

  “Where?”

  “I have to go to this place. But I wanted to thank you for your nice letter. Father McFall brought it to the hospital. It really cheered me up.”

  “Oh, it was nothing,” I said bitterly, recalling my forced effort with shame. Without thinking, I added, “This has been the worst summer of my life.”

  “Same here,” said Brian without the least hint of irony, which made me feel horrible.

  “How—how are you?” I was venturing just as Flora whisked into the kitchen to take the pineapple upside-down cake out of the oven. “It’s Brian,” I told her. “He’s out of the hospital.”

  “Am I keeping you?” Brian asked.

  “No, it’s just we have company for dinner.”

  “Oh, sorry. I’ll get off.”

  “No, I was already finished eating. Why are you going away tomorrow?”

  “It’s this place where they work on you so you can get better. I’ll be going to school there, too.”

  First Annie, now Brian. That left only Rachel, whose mother now hated me. It was while Brian was telling me that his mother was closing up their house and going with him that I realized he was talking in his old way, like before he had the speech lessons. The English accent was completely gone.

  “Listen,” I said. “Can I call you back in the morning so we can really talk?”

  “No, that’s okay, I just wanted to thank you for the letter. I’ll be going by ambulance first thing.”

  “Ambulance?”

  “It’s the most practical, for now. My mother will follow in the car. Listen, Helen, you be good. I guess we’ll see each other again sometime.”

  When I returned to the dining room, the lamps were switched on and Flora was serving out the cake. The way she broke off whatever she had been telling Finn made me sure she had been filling him in on my recent losses—“First her grandmother dies, then her little friend Brian gets polio, and her little girlfriend has just moved away …”—but she must have been telling about my father’s polio, too, because as I came in Finn was murmuring that it was “no wonder, then, he was being extra strict, considering his own experience.”

  “Well, how is Brian?” asked Flora, who had never even met him.

  “He’s going away by ambulance tomorrow morning.” A huge slice of pineapple upside-down cake, which Flora knew was my favorite, awaited me on my plate.

  “I thought you said he was home from the hospital.”

  “He is but tomorrow he’s going off to this other place where they will work on him some more. He won’t even be coming back for school.”

  “Probably one of those Sister Kenny places,” said Finn. “It’s an intense regimen but they get results, I’m told.”

  “We’re very lucky it didn’t turn into
an epidemic,” Flora prattled on. “Mrs. Jones said they’re going to go ahead with the fireworks on the Fourth. Though it’s so sad about that one little girl. Did Brian say anything about his legs, Helen?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask. If he’s going there in an ambulance, they’re probably not in the best shape.” I knew I sounded rude, but it was better than crying. Brian had spoken to me the way people do when they have already given up on you. I felt like giving up on myself. Flora always made sure I got a complete ring of pineapple in my serving of cake, and now its yellow eye glistened gelidly up at me: “Eat, little girl, and expand some more.”

  When we were having coffee back in the living room, Finn took a small sketchbook and pencil from his jacket pocket and asked if he might draw the room to send to his American mum. “Grace would love this. She has this way she wants her rooms to look but she says it’s not the kind of look you can just go out and purchase.”

  We sat on either side of him on the sofa and watched the agile pencil, which seemed like an extension of his hand, bring to life Nonie’s wing chair and the little painting above it, and then the eight-foot highboy looming in its shadowy corner, and then on to Nonie’s desk, which faced the window that used to have a view of the mountains. Finn evoked the highboy’s gloomy corner with hard, slanted lines that got closer together the darker he wanted the shadows. The branches that now obstructed the view he rendered with intricate wispy strokes. His shadows brought out the room’s spooky potential, and the erratic clutter of his branches made you feel the sadness of everything going to pieces around you. He commented as he drew: “What Grace wouldn’t give for that highboy. What a lovely little desk.”

  “My father refinished that desk for my grandmother,” I said. “He likes working with wood a lot better than having to kowtow to faculty egos.”

  Which really made Finn laugh.

  “She wrote her letters at that desk,” Flora had to put in. “She wrote her letters to me at that desk.” She was about to call on her gift of tears when I shot her a murderous look and she pulled herself up short and offered instead, “Six years’ worth of letters. Those letters from Mrs. Anstruther have become my guide for living, why, they have saved me from—”