Flora

by Gail Godwin

  Julian takes long walks against the mournful, eerie background music, missing his parents, until one day he comes upon a ruined beach cottage with DANGER and DO NOT TRESPASS signs all around it. An old fisherman tells him there was a bad fire years ago and then the property kept changing owners who never got around to rebuilding it and now it’s going to be torn down because it’s become a hazard for children who want to play in it.

  Of course, as soon as the fisherman leaves, Julian picks his way through the ruins and discovers to his delight and surprise that there is an old couple living quite happily in one small undestroyed room. They are just as delighted and surprised by him. Their names are Ethan and Peg, and they can’t get enough of him. They want to know everything about his life and all about his parents, even the sad parts, and they tell him his aunt can’t help but come to cherish him, he is such a fine boy. They once had a fine boy his age who died in the fire when this cottage belonged to them. The boy’s name was Luke. Soon the cottage will be torn down and they will have to leave, they tell Julian, but it has been a privilege to stay on for as long as they have in this place where Luke was last alive.

  Julian visits them every day. He is so eager to go out in the morning that his aunt grows curious and asks what he has been up to. She praises him for being so self-sufficient. He doesn’t mention the ruined cottage because she might forbid him to go there, but he says he is really getting to love the ocean and he hopes he’s not upsetting her schedule too much. And she says no, she’s getting used to having him around and then confesses in a softer, new voice, “In fact, Julian, I would miss you if you weren’t here.”

  At this point Flora buried her face in her hands and wailed.

  Then the day comes when he heads for the cottage and you can tell by the urgency of the music that this time it is going to be different. The cottage has been demolished at daybreak. The old fisherman is on the scene and Julian asks him, “Did they get the old couple out safely?” “What old couple?” the old fisherman asks. Julian tells him about Ethan and Peg, whose son, Luke, was killed in the cottage fire. “Son, are you joshing me?” asks the old man. He tells Julian that all three of those people were burned to death in that fire back in the 1890s, the son and the father and mother. Everybody on the island knew the story and Julian must have picked it up from some old-timer who got the facts slightly wrong.

  “But I saw them,” says Julian. “I saw Ethan and Peg. We talked.”

  “Sorry, son, that won’t wash with me. I grew up on this island and I remember how they looked when they found them. Try it on some newcomer.”

  Then Julian describes the couple, and finally the old fisherman says, “Lord, if that don’t sound exactly like I remember them. Even down to his sideburns—they called them muttonchops in those days—and her way of asking people all about their business. But look here, son, there are some things beyond rational explaining. You say they were kind to you and got you through a bad time. Well, if I were you I would be grateful for that, but I would keep it to myself.”

  THE THEME MUSIC swelled, and now the announcer was reminding us that this program had been brought to us by a wine “made in California for enjoyment throughout the world.”

  “Want to turn it off?” Flora asked. “Or would you like to listen to something else?”

  “No, no, turn it off. And don’t turn any lights on.”

  “Okay.” Flora wafted through the gloaming, and the orange fan-shaped panel on the big console went dark. Already the days were getting shorter. You could tell the difference between now and when we had listened to the program about the girl who becomes a mannequin. Then, as though she was intent on obeying my unspoken wishes as well, Flora returned to her end of the sofa and reassumed her knee-hugging position.

  “Were you scared?” she asked.

  “No. Were you?”

  “Not scared, no.” Her face merged into the surrounding blue dusk, but you could still make out the dark outline of her hair. She was close enough so I could smell her shampoo mingled with the perspiration at the nape of her neck. “I just thought it was perfect. How about you?”

  “I did, too.”

  As darkness filled the room, we floated companionably in our separate thoughts. I was still enveloped by the kind voices of Ethan and Peg, and even the softening aunt, and vibrating with the strange possibilities aroused in me by the program.

  “Oh, Helen, please tell me you haven’t been too bored this summer.”

  “Not too bored,” I conceded.

  May 21, 1944

  Dear Flora,

  How sweet of you to remember me with a Mother’s Day card. This is the first chance I have had to sit at my desk in relative quiet and answer your letter tucked inside it. Goodness, child! I hope I am up to all your faith in me.

  Helen is spending Sunday with a favorite friend. She went home from church with him. And Harry is dashing around getting ready to drive over the mountain to Tennessee for a summer job. He’s going to manage a construction crew for some top-priority war work at Oak Ridge. It’s called the Manhattan Project and Harry says it’s amazing how the minute you drop the name to the Ration Board they are all over themselves to shower you with permits for anything you want. It was one of those word-of-mouth opportunities that came about through our rector. The chaplain out at the Episcopal Academy had signed on, and he told Father McFall (our rector) that they were desperately looking for responsible people used to exercising authority who didn’t have to work during the summer months. I haven’t seen my son so excited for years. He can’t wait to leave.

  Now, Flora, where to start? You say you have no faith in yourself and you are afraid when you go out into the world people will “find you out.” What are you afraid they’ll find out? That you have no faith in yourself? Well, think what you’d be like if you did have faith in yourself and then act as though you are this person. The way she presents herself. The way she walks, enters a room, what she says—and what she does not say. I cannot stress the latter part enough. “Spoken word is slave; unspoken is master,” as the old adage goes. Just keep in mind that people do not read minds. They judge by what they see and hear, and you are a well-favored young woman with a modest, unaffected voice. Just let those two things work for you. You will be surprised how far they’ll carry you. Hold yourself like someone who sets value on her person and remember that a simple, courteous response will get you through practically anything. You don’t need to be witty (some people just aren’t gifted that way) or tell private things about yourself or your family.

  You warm this old heart the way you lavish praise on me, but I am basically just a country girl without much education who has tried to keep her dignity and make the most of the cards dealt her. As I sit at this handsome desk my son restored for me and look around me on this quiet afternoon (and yet the world is at war) in our safe house on top of this mountain, I am astonished that things have turned out for me as well as they have. And my wish for you, Flora, is that when you reach my age you will be able to say the same—and much more!

  Yours truly,

  Honora Anstruther

  XIX.

  Dear Rachel,

  You cannot imagine what a horrible

  Dear Rachel,

  How is the pool?

  Dear Rachel,

  Little did I know that the week with you would be the best

  Dear Rachel,

  I certainly hope your summer has been better than mine

  How could writing a letter be such torture? I had expected that sitting at my grandmother’s desk and using her writing materials would work some kind of spell and out would flow the words I needed to mend my fences with the Huffs. But so far I had crumpled four sheets of Nonie’s good stationery and I couldn’t even throw them in the wastebasket because Mrs. Jones would discover them and think less of me. I knew the effect I wanted my letter to have (to soothe Rachel’s hurt pride, to reestablish me in Mrs. Huff’s graces so she wouldn’t stand on street corners saying bad
things about me), but after what seemed like hours I was no nearer my goal than these four infantile, though correctly spelled, openings.

  Rachel was a horrible speller.

  The trouble was … What was the trouble? I didn’t really care about the Huffs all that much, but needed them to like and admire me. Was there something left out of my moral makeup, or did I just require more social lessons in how to act as if I cared? I could see Flora, for instance, scrawling a heartfelt letter that would redeem her with the Huffs. But, then, Flora wouldn’t need to be redeemed because she would have written a thank-you note in the first place. No, wait a minute! Didn’t Flora neglect to write Nonie after spending a whole week in our house after my mother’s funeral? (“we have been worrying and wondering ever since you left. We never heard from you”)

  Oh, it was not easy when you had lost the person who had taught you how to act. I took a fifth sheet of stationery from Nonie’s box and tried to hear what she would advise if she were in the room.

  Think what it would be like if you did care about them, darling, and then write the letter. Be simple and modest and don’t complain. Don’t make excuses for the delay, it only reminds them of the delay. The letter doesn’t have to be long. In fact, it’s better if it’s not long. That way they will be better able to read into it what they need.

  Dear Rachel,

  I hope you are having a good summer. I had a really nice time at your house. Please tell your mother hello for me and thank her for her hospitality. See you back at school. I really can’t wait.

  Your friend,

  Helen

  Oh, hell. I had used really twice. Which would be worse? To waste another sheet of Nonie’s good paper or to have Mrs. Huff think my writing style was childish?

  Flora was upstairs, working on her lesson plans for her real class in Alabama. This morning in our fifth grade she had assigned the children to be different parts of speech and get together in small groups and form sentences. It was something our English teacher had done with our class, but I let Flora think it was my idea. She said I was brilliant and then her usual thing about how she hoped she didn’t have anybody as smart as me in her real class or she wouldn’t know what to do. I thought it was all right to take credit for the parts of speech idea since I had run myself ragged being everyone in all the groups, from Suzanne the Noun and Brick the Verb to “Milderd” the Preposition and Jock the Interjection.

  Deciding that childishness might work in my favor in this particular letter, I addressed a matching envelope to Miss Rachel Huff, put a three-cent Victory stamp on it, and headed down what Finn called our holy terror of a driveway to be in time for the postman. I pictured Rachel scuffling down her driveway, kicking up as much white gravel as she could, and finding my letter in their box. She would rip it open the brutal way she opened her presents, scan it with a shrug, and take it back to the house to show her mother. “Well, well, better late than never,” Lorena Huff would say. She would read it over several times, cheered by my childish reallys. I wasn’t that superior to her Rachel, after all. “You know, Rachel, maybe we’ve been too hard on Helen. The poor child can’t be having a good summer. You can tell from all she doesn’t say. You notice she doesn’t mention that excitable cousin, and you can tell she misses our house and the pool.”

  It wasn’t lunchtime yet, so I went to sit in Nonie’s car and go on with my story of how it would be when Finn came to live with us. Any branch of the story could lead to satisfying little branchlets. Finn’s driving lessons could turn into the first time he lets me drive to school and how everyone sees me with him in the passenger seat, or it could take us on a trip around town where I point out significant landmarks of my history. (“That house over there was my grandfather’s first lodge for the Recoverers, but you have to keep in mind that this was a better part of town back then and things looked much nicer …”)

  “Guess what?” Flora greeted me when I came in for lunch. “Finn called.”

  “Did he ask for me?”

  “Well, he seemed ready to talk to whoever answered.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Mr. Crump had told him we were worried about him, and—”

  “I wasn’t worried. Maybe you were.”

  “What happened, honey? You were in such a good mood this morning.”

  “What happened was I spent the whole rest of the morning writing a stupid letter.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t stupid. You couldn’t be stupid if you tried. Was it to your father?”

  “I’m not writing him again until he writes me. If you must know, it was to the Huffs.”

  “It’s none of my business. I didn’t mean to pry.” Then, typical of Flora, she undermined her whole argument by asking was there any special reason I was writing to the Huffs, or was it just to say hello.

  “It was a thank-you letter I forgot to write sooner. But I think it’s better to write a thank-you note late than not to ever write it, don’t you?”

  “Oh, I definitely do.” I had expected her to blush or bury her face in her hands at the memory of her own rudeness, but my accusation went right over her. “Anyway, Finn said he wanted to fill us in on what’s been happening to him, so I invited him to dinner.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight. Was that okay?”

  “Did he sound good or bad?”

  “Good, I think. Maybe he’s heard something from that military board and he can start making plans for his future. I said we were only having Juliet’s wartime meat loaf recipe, which goes heavy on oatmeal for filler, but he sounded eager to come. I’m glad I still have some of Juliet’s dried oregano left. Maybe I’ll make some of her cheese straws for starters.”

  I was dying to say “Juliet who?” just to get her goat, but, looking ahead to the happy day when the Willow Fanning room would be empty and Finn would be settling into the Starling Peake room, I said, “I want to watch you make them so I can do it for my father after you’re gone.” She looked so pleased that I generously added, “But we will always call them Flora’s cheese straws.”

  XX.

  Finn looked more presentable, somehow. Since his last visit, his hair had grown out enough from its spiky crew cut to lie flat on either side of a part, and his beaky face had acquired a becoming layer of color. He wore a neatly ironed khaki shirt and trousers and some brown, military-looking shoes. He had brought us a bunch of fragrant roses in a variety of colors from the garden of the old lady who kept forgetting things, only he now referred to her as Miss Adelaide, and explained he had been watering her garden and feeding her cat while she recuperated in the hospital from a fall.

  “Cats prefer to stay in their own home even without their owners,” he said.

  “So do humans,” I pointed out, which struck me as a very witty comeback except that Flora sideswiped it by asking if poor Miss Adelaide had broken anything. She very luckily hadn’t, Finn said, though she was bruised all over her body from head to toe. Into my overexcited brain popped the image of a naked old lady showing Finn her bruises from head to toe and out of my mouth burst a childish snort of laughter, which embarrassed all three of us.

  “But we want to hear what’s been happening to you,” said Flora, taking Finn lightly by the arm and steering him into the living room. “Is there any news from that military board you met with?”

  “No final decision yet,” said Finn, settling into his former place on the sofa. “But if a person can guess when he’s made a good impression, I’d say there’s hope.”

  “Can you talk about it?” asked Flora breathlessly, sliding in next to him, “or is it a confidential matter?”

  “Sure, I can talk about it—with friends,” said Finn. “But to fill you in properly I’d need to go back a little. Ah, I was hoping you’d have that lemonade again.”

  “And Helen made the cheese straws.”

  “Not totally,” I corrected her. “You were standing right over me.”

  “Well, you shaped them completely without my he
lp,” insisted Flora, which drew attention to their rather clumsily twisted bodies on the serving plate.

  “Let him go on,” I said.

  “Well,” Finn began again, “I have to go back a little for it to make sense. Maybe as far back as September of ’forty-three, coming up two years ago, when we docked at Liverpool. There were five thousand of us on this transport ship built to carry one thousand. A bit crowded, but there you are. But it made our Nissen huts in the English countryside where we ended up seem like little palaces at first. My company was training hard, building foxholes, perfecting our skills of loving the ground. Remember, Helen, on our little … er … walk that day”—his eye caught mine to signal our secret was still safe—“and I was telling you how we learned to use the ground to keep ourselves alive?”