Flora

by Gail Godwin

  So for now I kept the room for myself. I liked lying on the bed Finn might soon be sleeping in, if I could only manage everything in a mature and diplomatic way. I liked reading the new book Mrs. Jones had brought from the library. This one, a book of fairy tales from around the world, she had chosen herself, and had read some of the stories herself before bringing it to me. Her favorite was one from Denmark, “The Princess in the Coffin,” and I had read that one first so we could talk about it when she came next Tuesday, which was my birthday. And I also liked lying there and thinking of my mother, soon to give birth to me, lying in this same spot and wondering what I would be like.

  The whole experience of being in Finn’s room was like lying in a hammock with my past, present, and future all tucked around me.

  XXV.

  Monday morning, the day before my birthday, Flora knocked on my door earlier than usual.

  “I thought we’d wash your hair before you get dressed.” She had brought along the saucepan we used for rinsing.

  “Why are you up so early?”

  “I was lying in bed thinking of all the things I wanted to get done today, and when I couldn’t go back to sleep I decided to just get up and start doing them.”

  “We always have breakfast first, then order the groceries before we wash my hair on Monday.”

  “And you always have to get undressed again. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. I’m such a numbskull.”

  “Well, wait a minute,” I said irritably. “I have to pee first.”

  “Don’t you want to take off your pajama top?” she asked, when I was getting ready to kneel on the stack of towels beside the tub.

  “I always leave on my undershirt.”

  “Well, goodness, Helen, we’re both girls. Oh, what does it matter? I’m in a good mood today.”

  “I bet I know why.”

  “Why?” She looked guilty.

  “Because you’ll be leaving in two weeks and four days.”

  “Look who’s counted up the actual days. Don’t be silly, honey. I’ll miss you and I hope you’ll miss me a little. I’ll never forget this summer. I’ve learned so much I feel I ought to pay your father tuition.”

  I bowed forward over the tub and thought, as I always did, about the guillotine. Flora ran the water to just the right temperature and poured panfuls over my hair until it hung down in one heavy mass. I groaned with pleasure at her deep, diligent lathering and was always a little sorry when the rinsing was over and every strand squeaked.

  “Your hair is the color of wheat,” Flora mused, as she always did when toweling it. “And such a lot of it.”

  “I wish I knew what I looked like,” I said.

  “Well, have a look.” She turned me around so I could see myself in the full-length mirror: a pink, cranky girl in pajamas wet around the collar. “Finn says all your features are the right distance from each other. You notice things like that when you’re drawing someone, he says.”

  “But that doesn’t mean pretty.”

  “It’s better than pretty. It means you’ll look good even when you’re old.”

  “I don’t care about when I’m old, I care about right now.”

  “Well, there is one thing you can do for right now.”

  “What?”

  “Stop frowning. And when people come into a room, look happier to see them.”

  After breakfast, we made our list and Flora called in the order. It was Mr. Crump on the other end, and, Flora being Flora, she sounded just as happy to be speaking to him as to Finn. Neither Flora nor I worried now if Finn didn’t answer, because we knew we’d be seeing him for the driving lesson at the end of his deliveries.

  Flora’s big project for the day was the pantry. “I want to take everything out, scrub down the shelves, and then organize things better for you and your father.”

  “Mrs. Jones can do that.”

  “Yes, but if Mrs. Jones does it, you won’t think of me every time you go into the pantry to look for something.” She was indomitably cheerful today. Nothing new had happened that I was aware of. She had received no mail on Saturday. She had washed her own hair yesterday and sat on the west porch drying it. Finn hadn’t come because Miss Adelaide invited him to Sunday supper again. We had listened to the radio some and then gone our separate ways to bed. Maybe she had had a nice dream. What would a nice dream be for Flora? Which brought me back to my first reason: she was looking forward to leaving. She had done a good job “caring” for me and now she wanted to go back to her life. Was I hurt by this? A little.

  “What did you do this summer, Flora?”

  “Oh, I took care of my little cousin Helen up in North Carolina. Her mother and I grew up together. Her father was off doing important war work in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and he asked me to stay with her. Did you ever hear of the Manhattan Project?”

  “How old was she?”

  “Ten, going on eleven. Very smart. Helen certainly kept me on my toes.”

  “But?” If Flora had a friend like Annie Rickets, she would poke at Flora until the negative things started trickling out.

  Flora would be cheerfully loyal at first. Then she would say, “Oh, I don’t know. It was just the two of us alone up there on the mountain. This big old house. And at the start of the summer there was a polio scare. It never did turn into an epidemic, but her father quarantined us. We couldn’t go anywhere or have any company. But as he’d had polio himself it was understandable.”

  “Nobody? For the entire summer?”

  “Well, there was this person who delivered our groceries.” (I couldn’t decide whether Flora would call Finn a boy or a man.) “And the family’s minister dropped by to bring news of this little friend of Helen’s who came down with polio.”

  “It’s a wonder you didn’t go crazy. I mean, what did the two of you do?”

  “Oh, we had our schedule. I made the meals. Wait, I forgot the cleaning woman. She came once a week, on Tuesdays. And Helen and I played school, so I would be prepared for my fifth grade, and we listened to the radio in the evenings if there was something good on. In many ways, Helen was an easy child. She liked to go off by herself and read, and sometimes mope.”

  “Mope?”

  “Well, she missed her grandmother, Mrs. Anstruther, who, I’ve told you, was just the most—”

  “Yes, yes, the most wonderful woman who wrote you all those wise letters you read over and over. I’ve heard all about her. Get back to Helen’s moping.”

  “I don’t think she liked me very much at the start. She found fault with me a lot. Of course there are a lot of things about me to find fault with.”

  “Okay, okay. We all know your low opinion of yourself. What did she find fault with?”

  “Just my general way of being, I think. Her mother was the same. Even when she was being sweet to me, Lisbeth always thought I wasn’t good enough.”

  “It’s sounding more and more like you had a perfectly awful summer, Flora.”

  “I admit it had its tense moments. But there were also joys.”

  “Oh? Let’s hear about those.”

  “Well, as you know, I finally learned to drive.”

  FLORA WAS SO caught up in her pantry reorganization that she could hardly keep still at lunch. I, on the other hand, felt so bad over the things I had imagined she would say about me to her Annie Rickets friend, that I made an extra effort to linger at the table and create some good memories of myself for her to take home. I complimented her on her thoroughness. (She had taken every single thing out of the pantry and set it out on the floor and washed down all the shelves.) I entertained her with the story of “The Princess in the Coffin,” which she didn’t know.

  “Goodness, that was in a children’s—I mean, a book for young people?”

  “Which part do you find so awful?”

  “All those young soldiers she killed. I mean, the soldier who finally gets her out of her coffin and wins her love still has to look at all those bodies she tore
apart and buried under the church floor.”

  “It’s stories from all different countries. This one’s from Denmark.”

  “Well, I’ll certainly be careful if I ever go to Denmark.”

  “You’re a girl, you wouldn’t have to worry. It’s the men who—”

  “Did you just hear a car, Helen?”

  It was Father McFall. The minute I saw his somber countenance looking down on us from the other side of the screen door, I was sure he had come to tell me Brian Beale had died. He entered, took in the pantry items spread all over the floor, and raised his eyebrows at the silent radio on the kitchen counter.

  “You two haven’t been listening to the radio?” he asked.

  “We just finished lunch,” said Flora. “Has something happened? Won’t you come in?”

  “Yes, thank you, I will, and yes, something has happened.”

  Stalking ahead of us into the living room, he gestured for us to be seated while he continued to pace back and forth in his black clericals. “I take it you haven’t heard, then, about the bombing over in Japan. That’s good, I was hoping to get up here first. With all the reports coming in about Oak Ridge, I wanted to assure Helen there’s absolutely no danger. Everyone is fine in Oak Ridge. I’ve just been on the telephone with Chaplain Dudley, who’s working there for the summer in much the same capacity as your father, Helen, though on another site, and he assures me that no one there is in any danger.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Are the Japs planning a bombing raid back?” Nonie and I had gone to see Mrs. Miniver twice and I was not unfamiliar with bombing raids.

  “I don’t think the Japanese will have much stomach for any more bombing raids, Helen. The thing we dropped on Hiroshima is something new in warfare. It’s—” He searched for words, then threw up his hands like someone releasing a flock of birds. “They’re saying it means the end of the war. But you’ll also be hearing unfounded rumors that the people at Oak Ridge, where the materials for the bomb were made, might be in some radioactive danger. That’s why I hurried up here. To dispel any of those speculations. Because they just ain’t so.”

  (“Poor Father McFall,” Nonie used to say. “Whenever he tries to talk like plain folk, all he does is sound condescending.”)

  “You mean,” Flora gasped, rubbing her arms like she did during our scary programs, “Helen’s father was making the bomb? That was the secret work?”

  “Helping to make, along with thousands of others. Yes, that was the secret work, although they didn’t know. Only the scientists and some highly placed government and Army people were in on the whole picture. The best kept secret in the history of the world, they’re saying. But they’re speculating all kinds of wild things on the radio and calling it news. I wanted to assure you that nobody at Oak Ridge has been harmed by what was being made there and that nobody is in any danger.” He permitted himself a wintry laugh. “Chaplain Dudley said when the news first came through that they had made the biggest bomb in the history of the world, some workers packed up and hightailed it out of there because they were afraid the place might explode any minute.”

  “Does this mean my father might be on his way home now?”

  “He wouldn’t be one of those, Helen. He’d go right on with his job for the rest of the day. That’s what Chaplain Dudley is going to do. After all, it’s Monday, a workday. They’ll clock in and clock out, maybe celebrate some among themselves after work.” Father McFall shot up a black sleeve and consulted his wristwatch. “Actually, though it’s my day off, I have opened the church and put a sign on the door that we’ll have Evening Prayer at five. Parishioners will want to thank God that this long war is finally going to end. And they may want to pray we won’t misuse this frightening new power we have just unleashed on the world.”

  As Flora and I were walking him to his car, we heard the phone. “I’ll get it,” I said. “It’s probably my father.”

  “Well, be sure and tell him I was here,” said Father McFall.

  But it was Finn. “Have you girls heard the news?”

  “About the bomb? Yes, my father helped make it.”

  A bump of silence. “Is it a joke with me you’re having?”

  “No, it’s true. Father McFall was just here to tell us. He’s been on the phone with someone he knows at Oak Ridge.”

  “Holy Mother of God.”

  “Of course, my father didn’t know what he was making,” I felt I should add. “Only the scientists and a few top government people knew. It was the best kept secret in the history of the world, Father McFall says.”

  “Have you talked to your father?”

  “Not yet. He might—he just might—be coming home for my birthday tomorrow, but that’s a secret, too. Not even Flora knows.”

  “Where is Flora?”

  Flora rushed into the kitchen. “Is that your father? I want to speak to him.”

  “No, it’s Finn. But I think he wants to talk to you.”

  WE KEPT THE radio on while Flora finished her pantry rearrangement. I was given the job of wiping down each item with a damp dish towel before it was allowed back in, which unfortunately recalled to me the night I had wiped my father’s bloody brow after he had passed out on the kitchen floor. As Father McFall had warned us, there was all kinds of news. Between the national bulletins, some with gory details of what had been done to Hiroshima and its people, local citizens were interviewed and encouraged to express their reactions to the bomb, which was now being called the atomic bomb. Some of these reactions were pretty vindictive about how the Japs had it coming to them, but when some man, or woman, on the street went too far for good taste, the radio person quickly intervened, saying the loss of life was of course deplorable but think of the American lives saved because the war would end quickly now. Flora listened carefully to everything, occasionally uttering yips of pity and horror, whereas I was mainly interested in the mentions of Oak Ridge. I kept expecting to hear my father’s name.

  After we had finished the pantry and admired it, Flora turned off the radio and said we needed to go for a walk.

  “If I had these weeks to do over,” she said, as we skidded arm in arm down our driveway, “I would do some things differently.”

  “What?” I was really curious.

  “I would have got you out more.”

  “But we couldn’t go anywhere.”

  “We could have walked.”

  “We have walked.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean to the mailbox and back. Real walks. We could have gone on little hikes through the woods. Taken picnics.”

  In the mailbox, along with the flighty black ant that seemed to have taken up residence there, was a single pink envelope addressed to me by an adult. Inside a birthday card with a picture of two rabbits hopping off together, Rachel Huff had written in her tortured script: “See you back at school!” My belated thank-you note had achieved its purpose: at least they weren’t my enemies anymore.

  “Isn’t that nice of them,” said Flora.

  “Mrs. Huff keeps a drawer full of cards for all occasions,” I informed her. “And she has this book with everybody’s address and their birthdays and anniversaries. All she had to do was pick a card, write my address, put on a stamp, and make Rachel write something.”

  “Well, it was still thoughtful of them.”

  I conceded it was. “Even though my birthday’s not till tomorrow.”

  “You have to tell me what kind of cake you want. Did … your grandmother make you some special cake?”

  “Please don’t say any more until tomorrow. It might be bad luck.”

  “Oh, okay,” said Flora, as though she understood, which she didn’t. She had no idea about the hatpin under the pillow.

  “Let’s walk up to the top of Sunset Drive,” she said. “I’ve never been that way.”

  “There’s nothing up there but logging roads, but be my guest.”

  “I blame myself for not getting you out more,” said Flora. “It’s my own lack of im
agination. I didn’t grow up with all this land around me. And yet we walked more in a day in Alabama than you and I have done all summer. We walked to the grocery. Then if we needed something else, we walked there again. And then Daddy started what he called his regime.”

  “What’s a regime?”

  “He made himself walk a mile every day. The doctor said he was too sedentary, sitting around playing cards so much, and also he was getting fat. So Daddy started walking all the way around the roundhouse between fixing the engines. He worked out it would equal a mile if he walked it twice a day. He got so used to his walk that he went to the roundhouse on his days off and I would go with him. Though we only went around once, which was just half a mile.”

  “Are you saying I’m getting fat?”

  “Oh no, honey, I wasn’t. I’m talking about him. Oh, poor Daddy. I still catch myself thinking that when I get home he’s going to come out the door and hug me.” A brief spate of tears followed, but by now they were the expected thing, a part of Flora, like her childish feet with the too-friendly toenails. “Today I thought we’d look at that land Mr. Quarles was talking about. Where they cut down all the good trees and left a mess and he wants to build the houses for the GIs. What was it your father called him?”

  “The Old Mongrel.”

  “What had he done to deserve that?”

  “You don’t have to do anything to be a mongrel. You just are one, like a dog without a pedigree.”

  “My goodness,” said Flora, with an uneasy laugh, “I guess that must make me one.”

  XXVI.

  I was glad Finn no longer dressed up before he came to us. He had wet-combed his hair and he must have washed his body after his other deliveries because he didn’t have that smell like the day I rode behind him on the motorcycle. He wore his paratrooper boots, shined, with the pants tucked inside, and he had on that shirt with the eagle patch on the sleeve. He said people had waved to him on the street as though he had been part of what happened today.

  “Well, you are part of it,” said Flora. “Just as Helen’s father is part of it.” That was going a bit too far, I thought. My father had been at Oak Ridge making the bomb, whereas Finn, as much as we liked him, had spent the last year in the hospital.