by Gail Godwin
The new disarray allowed me to snatch up a letter at random and retreat to safety without having to spend time making the packet look untouched. But it destroyed my plan of reading the letters as they had been written. I had been hoping to construct a chronicle of how Nonie had been lured into the correspondence and what she might have revealed to Flora that she hadn’t had a chance to reveal to me before she died.
Forced to read the letters (some undated, often the ones missing envelopes) in this haphazard fashion, during which Nonie gamely responded to Flora’s various crises, I wasn’t sure whether Flora was sixteen or eighteen or twenty when she was having them. I wasn’t even sure what some of them were: Nonie could be maddeningly oblique. I needed Flora’s side of the correspondence because she was sure to have spilled all, but hadn’t I watched those letters disappear into Nonie’s pocket, doomed to the place of no rereadings? And she had surely taken her own advice and destroyed them as soon as possible.
I also felt let down by the, so far, few mentions of me in the letters. I had yet to read about the little girl whose report cards were such a joy and who was the chief reason for Nonie to go on living. “I’m going to pick up Helen from school and take her to the movies so my son can have a quiet house” was not a description of the person I thought I was.
“OH DEAR, I hope Finn is all right,” Flora said after ordering our groceries.
“Why shouldn’t he be?” I asked, though I had been wondering about him myself but didn’t want to be the one to bring it up.
“It was this impatient man on the phone. He kept cutting me off before I finished my sentences.”
“That was Mr. Crump. He owns Grove Market. I wouldn’t take it personally. He’s just in a bad mood generally.”
(“Poor Archie Crump,” Nonie had said, when we were driving home from the market. I had been complaining that Mr. Crump looked straight through me as though I wasn’t there. “He does that with all children,” said Nonie, “I wouldn’t take it personally. Things didn’t work out for him as he expected.” “What things?” “Well, Archie started off as a stock boy at Grove’s—he was in high school with Harry. Then he married Mr. Grove’s daughter, but after Mr. Grove died and Archie inherited the store, Serena Crump went off to live by herself at the beach.” “Why?” “Well,” said Nonie, pausing to assemble an answer, “maybe she came to realize she hated groceries.” This sent me into hysterical laughter. Nonie continued to face front, behind the steering wheel, her nose uplifted—so high in the air a bird could poop in it, Annie would say—but she allowed herself a wry smile. “It’s not you particularly he ignores,” she added. “He just doesn’t notice children in general.” “Maybe we make him sad because he never had any,” I suggested. “That’s a sweet thought, darling,” she said, reaching over to pat my hand.)
“I just hope Finn’s not unwell,” Flora went on.
“He was probably already out delivering groceries,” I said. But now she had me worried. Could his lung or his mental state have collapsed again? Could he have displeased Mr. Crump and gotten fired? I was surprised at the alarm such prospects raised in me. Ever since his evening with us, I had been plotting how, as soon as Flora left, my father and I would ask Finn to come and live with us. “You can be our honorary Recoverer,” I imagined myself saying to him. I had Starling Peake’s room picked out for him, with the nicest of the oriental rugs my father had discarded, and we could put in a desk where he could draw views from the window, after he had topped the trees, which he had already offered to do. He would drive me to and from school in Nonie’s car and we would run errands as Nonie and I had done and my father would pay him “something,” as he was paying Flora “something.” Finn’s joining us would improve life for all three of us. In the evenings, the two men would have their drinks together and I would serve them Flora’s cheese straws, which I was going to have her teach me to make. And by the time Finn came to live with us, I would also have learned to cook a few meals whose aromas could make a man swoon.
But it was Mr. Crump in the Grove Market van who arrived with our order in the late afternoon. Flora got off to a bad start with him by flying out barefooted and asking where Finn was.
“Day off,” said Crump with a scowl. “That driveway of yours is a liability.”
“We’re getting it fixed as soon as the war is over,” I piped up, but he neither heard nor saw me.
“Here, let me help you with those boxes,” said Flora.
“Better go back,” he warned, looking her up and down. “You’ll cut up your feet.”
“Oh, they’re tough as old nails,” Flora said with a laugh, wresting a box away from him. But then, going triumphantly up the porch stairs ahead of him, she stubbed her toe and yelped, almost dropping the box.
“What’d I tell you,” said Crump, with the nearest thing to a smile I had ever caught on his sour face. He held the door for her and set down his box of groceries next to hers on the kitchen counter. Then he took a deep breath and let out an animal-like groan.
“Are you all right, Mr. Crump?”
“Yes, ma’am. It was just—”
“Oh, please call me Flora. I’m Helen’s cousin. Her mother and I grew up together in Alabama. Why don’t you sit down a minute, Mr. Crump, if you can spare the time. I’ve got some corn bread ready to come out and it’s never better than when you have it hot with a glass of cold milk. That’s what I’m going to do, and it would be nice to have some company. Helen, how about you?”
“No, thank you. I’m going out.”
I fled to the garage, to sit in Nonie’s car and fume, but not before I’d heard Flora begin to confide how hard the summer had been for “poor Helen being cooped up with nobody but me, what with this polio scare and her little friend and she misses her grandmother …” Old spill-all Flora, even to such an audience as Mr. Crump. Had she really thought I was going to sit down at the table with that rude old man and let him ignore me some more?
I was disgusted by the whole scene between them. Why did she show no discrimination about people? If it had been Finn (why had he taken a day off during the workweek?) I could see her inviting him to sit down for corn bread and company. But didn’t she see how Mr. Crump had looked almost happy when she stubbed her toe? Even his own wife couldn’t stand him and had to go off and live at the beach.
I sat in the car, rocking the steering wheel to the left and to the right. I turned an imaginary key in the ignition and heard the engine roar into life. “Now, back out slowly,” Finn instructed from the passenger’s seat. “There is no rush. No rush, a-tall, a-tall. I saw the way you made up your mind to jump, that day in the woods. You can do anything you set your mind to.”
At last Flora and Crump emerged from the house. I could see them without turning my head. They were talking and looking toward the car. If they walked over, I would look right through Mr. Crump. If Flora addressed me, I would have to answer, but I would do it in a way to make Mr. Crump feel he wasn’t there. I prepared it so well I was disappointed when I heard the grocery van start up and watched it bump down the drive. Flora went back into the house. I would do the next best thing, I decided. I wouldn’t say his name to Flora no matter what. It would be like she’d been having the corn bread all by herself and there was nothing to talk about.
But Flora, in full dinner-making mode now, was eager to talk. “It seems Finn had some important meeting today with a medical board out at the military hospital.”
I kept silence, not rising to my usual “How did you know that?”
“It seems,” Flora went on, “the Army is reviewing his case. He may get an honorable discharge instead of a medical discharge, and then he’d be entitled to all the normal GI benefits.”
“But he said he was already discharged.”
“Yes, but evidently his father, who knows some senator, got involved and now they have to reconsider.”
So far she had substituted “it seems” and “evidently” for a certain person’s name. Was she tacitly obeyin
g my embargo? Had all those hours playing fifth-grade class together sharpened her sense of me?
But over dinner (we were having macaroni and cheese, along with the milk a certain person had delivered and drank some of) she allowed herself some hes and hims.
“I’m so glad I asked him to sit down a minute. When he groaned like that I thought he was ill, but you know what it was?”
I narrowed my eyes at a heaped forkful of macaroni and cheese.
“It was the corn bread,” said Flora. “He smelled the corn bread and it reminded him of his mother. He told me that after we had talked awhile. Isn’t that touching?”
I filled my mouth with the heaped forkful and looked out the window.
“Oh, and he asked if your father was interested in selling the Oldsmobile. He wants it for his wife.”
“His wife! She doesn’t even live here!”
“No, but he said she had always admired Mrs. Anstruther’s touring car. He was thinking he might drive it down to her at the beach and come back on the bus. If she had such a car, Serena—isn’t that a nice name?—might be tempted to come home more. I gather there have been some differences between them, but, you know, Helen, differences sometimes get ironed out over time. Look at your uncle Sam and aunt Garnet in Alabama, getting remarried after being separated for twenty-six years. Wouldn’t it be sweet if Mrs. Anstruther’s car were to be the means of their reconciliation?”
“My father isn’t going to sell my grandmother’s car so the Crumps can get reconciled.”
“Of course not, honey. I only meant … And besides, it’s up to your father. I told him that.”
XVIII.
When did remorse fall into disfavor? It was sometime during the second half of my life. As a child, I knelt next to Nonie in church and said alongside her sedate contralto: the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable. Then, for a long time I didn’t go to church, and when I next said the General Confession it had been watered down to we are truly sorry and we humbly repent. If someone had really done you an ill turn and later came to you and said, “I am truly sorry,” would that mean as much to you as “the burden of it has been intolerable to me”?
Remorse is wired straight to the heart. “Stop up the access and passage to remorse,” Lady Macbeth bids the dark spirits, “that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose.”
Remorse went out of fashion around the same time that “Stop feeling guilty,” and “You’re too hard on yourself,” and “You need to love yourself more” came into fashion.
“The summer I turned eleven,” I might begin, and often have begun, “I was left in the care of my late mother’s first cousin. She was twenty-two. It was for the most part a boring, exasperating summer. Such an isolated summer would not be possible today. We had the radio and the mail and the telephone (though few people wrote or called) and the woman who came to clean on Tuesdays and the man who delivered our groceries. Most days my feelings fell somewhere on the scale between bored / protected and bored / superior. But there were also times when I felt I had to fight to keep from losing the little I had been left with, including my sense of myself. Maybe I fought too hard. Anyway, the summer ended terribly (grievously?) and I have wondered ever since how much of it I caused.”
After I have furnished some specifics, I am always told, in one way or another, that I am being too hard on myself. “You were a child, not even an adolescent yet. You had lost your model and your bulwark and were clinging to your foundations, such as you had been taught to perceive them, and you were ready to fight anyone who threatened them.”
Or: “At eleven, your cerebral cortex was still growing and your cognitive powers hadn’t finished developing. You were still floating in a continuum of possibilities and discovering what was in your power to do. But you weren’t yet adept at foreseeing the consequences of what was in your power to do.”
Or: “Then was then. Now is now. Put all that behind you, accept the person you have become through your particular gifts and failures. It is all flow, anyway. Disruption and regeneration. Forgive that child and go forth and sin no more. At least, try to do no harm in the years remaining to you.”
Remorse derives from the Latin remordere: to vex, disturb, bite, sting again (the “again” is important). It began as a transitive verb, as in “my sinful lyfe dost me remord.”
But now I say alongside Thomas à Kempis: “I would far rather feel remorse than know how to define it.”
MRS. JONES LIMPED in on Tuesday with her right ankle taped to twice its size. She had turned it while out walking, she said. Flora made a huge fuss over her and begged her to sit down and let her make her a nice breakfast. “And then I can help with the cleaning, Mrs. Jones. Under your supervision, of course.”
“Thank you, I’ve had my breakfast, and it don’t hurt nearly as bad as it looks. It’s only twisted, not sprained. I’ll be able to do my work just fine.”
“Well, I can certainly do my room and change my linens.”
“That’s thoughtful of you, but I would get all turned around if I didn’t stick to my usual system. I’ve got to the place where my routine more or less runs me.”
“At least let me make you a cup of tea,” implored Flora.
“Oh, I’ve got my thermos of tea.”
“Well, just please call me if you need anything,” said Flora. “Will you at least promise me that?”
Mrs. Jones said she would. She had finally stopped calling her ma’am after Flora’s repeated injunctions to call her Flora and now respectfully abstained from calling her anything at all.
Flora said she would work on her lesson plans upstairs until Mrs. Jones came up at noon to do the top floor. Naturally we couldn’t play fifth-grade class when she was in the house.
I went outside to bide my time in the garage while Mrs. Jones scrubbed the kitchen floor and went over her life. I knew almost to the minute when it would be time to join up with her in Nonie’s old room to change my sheets. The car had become my designated place for thinking about Finn and planning the details of his moving in with us. Also, I felt the car was more in need of my company and protection since the grocer had expressed his horrible intention to Flora.
Mrs. Jones told me she had turned her foot in the dark walking back from the lake after the Fourth of July fireworks. “It didn’t start hurting till I got home. It throbbed and swole up something awful but I kept my feet elevated as much as I could.”
“You didn’t go to the doctor?”
“No, I could tell it wasn’t broken or sprained.”
“How could you tell?”
“You can tell a right smart lot about your body when you get to my age.”
“Did you do that remembrance thing for the little girl?”
“I did. Every time a pretty firework went up over the lake I did.”
“But there must have been lots of pretty fireworks.”
“I waited for the ones Rosemary would have thought pretty. The ones in color, or the whirly ones.”
“And did you say the thing aloud?”
“I did, even though some folks looked at me funny. Every time I said it, ‘Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten,’ I thought of that little girl, on her way to camp, but her and the aunt stopping for that swim. When I was walking back to the car after the fireworks, I stumbled in the dark and turned my ankle.”
“But you carried out Rosemary’s wishes.” I aimed for the bright side. We had finished Nonie’s bed and I wanted to keep the conversation going as long as possible.
“Well—” Mrs. Jones began, but could not go on. The trembly corners of her mouth seemed to be fighting against the stoic slabs of her cheeks and making them twitch.
I made smoothing motions with my palm on Nonie’s newly made bed and lowered my eyes. I knew better than to prod Mrs. Jones with my imperious what? which worked so well on Flora. I waited, wondering if I would at last see this stolid woman cry.
But after a ragged breath she
went on. “The day after the lake, when I was resting with my feet up, Rosemary spoke to me. Only she sounded different. She sounded …”
A second ragged breath. “She sounded like a much older girl. ‘Mama,’ she said, ‘I want you to listen carefully. Are you listening?’
“I said ‘I always listen to you, you know that, deary.’ And then she said—in this voice of a much older girl—‘What I keep having to remember, over and over again, Mama, is that you are older now. You could have hurt yourself bad down there at the lake and there would be nobody to take care of you. I have to be more careful what I say. Maybe it would be better if I stopped saying anything.’
“‘Oh, don’t do that,’ I begged. ‘I look forward to it so much. Please don’t do that, deary. It would break my heart.’”
I waited until Mrs. Jones had picked up her polishing cloth and started in on the furniture, applying her respectful weekly swipe to Nonie’s purse on the dresser. She was her steady self again, the one about whom Nonie had said, “I admire that woman. Despite all her adversities, Beryl Jones manages to stay in control of her days.” But Beryl Jones seemed to have forgotten I was in the room.
“What did Rosemary say?” I finally burst out.
Mrs. Jones folded over the dust cloth to a clean place and began on a lampshade. The monolithic slabs of her cheeks lay perfectly still now. “I haven’t heard a peep from her since.” She gave an odd dry laugh. “But I’ve been talking a blue streak to her. I sat for the better part of two days with my feet elevated and I talked and talked. I said, ‘You know what, deary? I’m not the only one getting older. You’re growing up, too. I can tell it from your voice. You’re getting to be a responsible young woman who wants to take care of me and I love you for it.’ And, you know, I’ve felt her close by. And something else: the more I sat there and talked a blue streak, the more I could feel my ankle healing.”
TUESDAY EVENING WAS the mystery program Flora and I liked. The recent ones hadn’t been as good as the one about the little girl who turned into a mannequin, but we felt from the start that this one had potential. “I’m getting goose bumps already,” announced Flora, curled up at the other end of the sofa from me. From the cabinet radio’s big speakers came the sound of the ocean going in and out against mournful, eerie background music. A twelve-year-old boy, Julian, whose parents have died, has become the ward of his aunt who lives on an island. You could tell at once from the aunt’s voice that she isn’t going to be much comfort. She is an old maid wedded to her solitary schedule. She paints pottery with island scenes and sells it to the tourists, and her pet words are livelihood and self-sufficient. When she speaks of Julian’s parents it sounds as though they have gone and died on purpose so she would be stuck with him. But a boy his age is lucky to get to live beside the ocean, she keeps reminding him, and he will have to be self-sufficient and find ways to amuse himself during the day while she earns their livelihood.