Flora

by Gail Godwin

  Now she’s picking up the glass, which is dusty, and swallowing more cognac and making a face. How could Nonie enjoy this stuff? Wine I could see: like all sophisticated children, I had been allowed wine mixed with water on special occasions. But this was like swallowing pepper. It made you shudder all the way down. Nonie said it stimulated your heart more than wine.

  Maybe I would grow up to have a faulty heart. I might have one already. (“Her little heart just stopped. Barely four months after her grandmother died, she was found dead. Found dead on her birthday in the grandmother’s bed. It was the cleaning woman who discovered her. The person who had been staying with her for the summer thought she was just sleeping late. ‘There was too much excitement the day before. I mean, with her father and the bomb and all. She’d had a long day and was a little cross by the end of it, but I never suspected there was anything wrong. I ought to have checked on her, but she said she was very tired and didn’t want to say good night and closed her door. Now I will never forgive myself. I just wasn’t up to the task. I failed her father and I failed her.’”)

  Beyond my closed door, the dance music went on. They could be dancing now. The firm palm of Finn bracing her back, the twilight blue dress swishing all over his legs. (“You are so good to her, Finn. You will make a wonderful father someday. But, did you see the way she tossed back that brandy? Her father would kill me if he knew. Of course, he doesn’t set a very good example himself. She’s such a moody child. Smart, but so moody. There have been times when I thought we were doing real well, and then there have been other times when I’m counting the days and the hours and the minutes until I can say good-bye forever to this strange old house.”)

  I stood up and pushed away the bench and pondered my full length in the long mirror. A girl in a shapeless blouse and skirt and socks and loafers because her nice dress no longer fit. I would need new clothes for school and who would be there to say, “Now that’s smart”? I was not tall enough to drape a hand over my dancing partner’s shoulder, but Finn said he hadn’t gotten his full height until seventeen. “Hair the color of wheat” sounded just like Flora: “And over here Juliet Parker has planted us a little field of wheat.” I preferred “tawny,” or “dark blond.” According to Finn, all my features were the right distance from each other, which Flora said meant better than pretty. But Finn had also praised Flora’s far-apart eyes. Flora said my looks would improve if I would look happier to see people when they came into a room. I smiled at myself in the mirror and the image responded with a simpering grimace. If you were really happy to see someone come into a room, you wouldn’t necessarily smile. I had seen people not smile who were glad to see me. Brian didn’t smile, he just looked as though something that belonged to him had reappeared. Nonie wasn’t a natural smiler, either. When she was really appreciating something I’d said or done, she looked like someone looks when they have been proved right.

  (“She’s a little girl who’s had a lousy summer,” Finn might be saying as he danced Flora round the threadbare carpet. “Seeing nobody but us, one friend getting polio, the other moving away, and the third one you say she doesn’t like so well. And it’s her first summer without her grandmother. She’s entitled to a few moods. And didn’t she thank me sweetly for the pencils, and you for all the things you did for her today?”)

  I gulped another swig from the aperitif glass and kept my mirror face from registering the cognac’s ravaging passage down my gullet. I practiced looking like a person happy to see someone without needing to force a simpery smile. There. You did have some control over how you appeared to others.

  A welcome new feeling of invulnerability lit up my insides and I decided to be generous on the eve of my eleventh birthday and go back and say good night like the kind of person people would want to see more of.

  THEY WERE NOT dancing to the music as I had permitted them to do in my thoughts, and they were not on the sofa where I had left them. The tray and the coffee things were gone from the coffee table, but the glass of milk remained. The plate underneath had been removed, but two Fig Newtons and a shard of pound cake huddled together on the sailboat napkin from my sixth birthday. Flora was obviously planning to pay a bedtime visit against my wishes. Our two sketch pads, Finn’s and mine, lay at one end of the sofa, both opened to the Flora portraits. Maybe Finn had gone already, but why had I not heard the motorcycle?

  I crossed the carpeted dining room and was about to enter the kitchen when a muffled sound made me stealthy. Flora and Finn were locked in an embrace by the sink. This was no movie kiss. Their mouths mashed together as though each was trying desperately to disappear down the other’s throat. I fled, stopping briefly by the coffee table long enough to pour the glass of milk over the two portraits of Flora and the unguilty sofa cushion that happened to be lying beneath.

  XXVII.

  How was it that I was magically skimming our treacherous driveway in the almost-dark without a single stumble? And in my leather-soled loafers, not my rubber-gripping Keds. (Was I doomed for the rest of my life to think of Mrs. Huff every time I thought of Keds?)

  I felt weightless and glowing with the power of revenge. Was it the cognac or was it the hilarious replay of myself dumping the milk—or was it both? Just beneath the hilarious replay crept a curdling flow of loss and shame. I needed to outrun this flow until it had hardened solid and could no longer suck me into it.

  Sunset Drive was already in darkness, but the tops of the trees, raucous with insect life, made black cutout designs against a greenish metallic sky. What color would Finn give it, or did his “special names” apply only to dresses?

  The last time I had walked down Sunset Drive by myself had been at midday in early summer. Flora’s clothes had just arrived and I was fleeing her Alabama talk and her insulting notion that I had undergone “a strange childhood.” On this midday walk I had hoped to get some of myself back only to find it slipping away with every step I took. At this first bend in the road, I had looked through a veil and seen Sunset Drive going on just the same without me. And then had come the awful draining away and the loss of words to account for what was happening to me. That’s when Nonie’s voice had told me to sit down on the ground in the shade and let everything go.

  “Don’t children have little imaginary friends?” Flora had wanted to know, ironing her Alabama clothes and telling that story I would rather not have heard about a certain skirt. When I said I was going for a walk, she asked should she come, and I said no, I was going out to look for an imaginary friend.

  And then someone’s boots creaked and someone’s armpits smelled and I was brought back from nothingness by someone saying, “Hello, hello? Is anyone there?”

  Together we scuffed downhill so I could show him my grandfather’s shortcut. I pointed out the streetlight at the hairpin curve that “ruffians came all the way across town to shoot out,” and he delighted me by falling into the same trap I had fallen in when Nonie explained about the ruffians. “Why didn’t they shoot out the streetlights on their own side of town?” he wanted to know. “Because,” I crowed triumphantly, “they already have.”

  The ruffians had been here again—no streetlight illuminated the hairpin curve tonight. But my eyes had grown used to the darkness, and I could make out the entrance to my grandfather’s overgrown path that followed the broken-down railing until it dipped out of sight into the crater. (“Ah, I know what you’re capable of … I’ve seen you jump into the unknown. … I know, I know. It’s our secret.”)

  Branches slapped and brambles clawed as I felt my way through the indistinct undergrowth, no yipping Flora following close behind at noontime, no fast-moving paratrooper crashing ahead in daylight. I hoped, vaguely, to be hurt. Not killed, or crippled like Brian, or even to have my face scarred for life with slashes, but just damaged in some way that would make people sorry I’d had to go through this night and equally amazed that I had come out of it as well as I had.

  I tripped and went down. Reaching out with my hands,
I groped emptiness just ahead of where I had fallen. I was at the edge of the crater! I had almost gone over! But no, it was just a deep rut, like the bad one on our driveway the garbageman and the towing man had covered with a piece of board. Nevertheless, I decided to crawl the rest of the way to the crater on my hands and knees. My plan was to let myself carefully down its side, holding on to the sassafras tree the way I had been taught. And then what? To be found curled at the bottom, exposed to the night? But it would be harder to freeze to death in August than in November, when he had done it, and I had no intention of taking off my clothes and being found naked.

  I scraped my knee badly while edging backward down the slope, and paused to reassess my strategy when I finally gained hold of the sassafras tree. Crouching at its base, I indulgently dabbled in the blood running down my leg. When it kept coming, I wiped some of it on my face and licked its metallic flavor off my fingertips.

  Had they discovered the damage back at the house yet? (Flora: “Oh! What happened here?” “Well, I think some milk was spilled,” Finn would say matter-of-factly, noting the empty glass. “But—oh dear, the sketch pads! Both of them ruined. Maybe we can save them. Not my portraits, what do those matter, but maybe the pads aren’t completely soaked through. What do you think happened?” “I think someone was angry.” “But why would she—? Oh, no! You don’t think she saw—Oh dear, look at the sofa! Her father is going to kill me.” “Leave it, love. Why don’t you go and check on her?”)

  How long would it take for them to figure out what to do? (“She’s not in her room, and the door is wide open.” “Where would she most likely go?” “Well, maybe the garage. She often sits in the Oldsmobile when she’s moping.”)

  Not in the garage. Not in the Oldsmobile, “moping.” What next? Search the rooms of the house? (“Would she have run away?” “She never has before. Oh, dear, I’m sure she must have seen us in the kitchen, but how? She had gone to her room, she had said good night.”

  “People,” Finn would reason patiently, “have been known to come out of their rooms after they have said good night and gone into them.”)

  If she wasn’t in the car and wasn’t in the house, where would she have gone? The gift of tears would surely have kicked in by now, and Finn would have to perform some manly comforting while organizing what to do next. “I want you to stay here at the house, in case she shows up. I’ll do a bit of reconnaissance work outside.” “Will you take the motorcycle? Or since it’s an emergency I’m sure her father wouldn’t mind if you took the car—” “No, reconnaissance is best done on foot. Now, I want you to stay here, is that agreed?”)

  I slouched down at the base of the sassafras tree and rested my feet on the bumpy root below. If someone were to come after me soon, they wouldn’t have to descend all the way into the crater. Or, if I thought it best, I could always scramble down at the last minute, though it wouldn’t be so easy in the dark and with no one to catch me. But for now I would wait here and count how many nature noises I could identify. Cicadas, tree frogs, rustlings of larger bodies on the ground that I didn’t want to think about right now. Mrs. Jones said when you heard your first cicadas it was just six weeks till the first frost, and they had been going strong for days now. Starling Peake had kept a tree frog in his room for a whole winter; it lived in a fern pot and liked to come out in the daytime and cling to the top of an upholstered chair with its little sucker feet. (“There was something adorably boyish about Starling, even though he let us down badly.”) I had been planning to tell this anecdote to the next inhabitant of Starling’s room, after I had finished with the more important stories of the house.

  Distant gunfire exploded from below. Then I realized they were shooting off fireworks in town. To celebrate the bomb, of course. Would my father be a local hero? “There goes Harry Anstruther, he helped make the secret bomb that finally ended the war.” I wasn’t clear whether Oak Ridge would be someplace people would keep working at, now that its purpose had been accomplished. Just as well if it closed down. I loved my father, but he had sounded tempted by the prospect of staying on there, and I knew without ever seeing it that I would hate living there in a little house and going to school like a child on a reservation. Maybe they would send him home with a bonus: big enough so we could fix up Old One Thousand. If he came tomorrow for my birthday he would be surprised by the repaired gutters and our reopening of the circular driveway around the house. If only things hadn’t turned out the way they had tonight. But whose fault was that? I was the one who had been ambushed by the unimaginable. How could people be so double-dealing?

  Officially, my birthday wasn’t until late tomorrow. I had “finally decided to make my entrance” at six fifteen in the evening, according to Nonie. The time was recorded by her in blue ink in my baby book.

  “Was she very tired when I finally came out?” I always wanted to know.

  “You are always tired when you finish having a baby,” Nonie said, “but I would say she was more relieved than anything else.”

  “Why?”

  “She had been working hard to make you come out for eighteen hours. That’s a long time. But between her contractions she could be quite droll. ‘Honora, I’ve just had an awful thought,’ she said. ‘What if he decides he’d rather not come out?’ ‘Then,’ I said, ‘we’ll have to think of something really special to bribe him with.’ This made her laugh.”

  “But where was my father?”

  “He was waiting at a proper distance to be informed. I was the one who saw her through. Early on, the nurse came in and said, ‘Mrs. Anstruther, what, pray tell, are you doing in the bed with Mrs. Anstruther?’ ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I said. ‘I am lying beside her, sharing her labor pains.’”

  I liked this story except for one thing. “Why did she have to call me a he?”

  “Oh, darling, that’s nothing. It’s just gender shorthand for babies who haven’t been born yet. It’s the same as when people refer to ‘the history of man,’ or ‘mankind.’ She knew you were you, all along.”

  The fireworks had stopped. Had they run out or gone to get some more? I thought of Mrs. Jones waiting for the pretty fireworks Rosemary liked best and then saying “Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten,” even though people looked at her funny.

  What if nobody came after me? Would I have to stay here until my father started searching tomorrow? And if nobody was going to come, what was the point in spending the night with my bottom getting damp from the ground and goose bumps on my arms and tree bark digging into my shoulders? Maybe I should drag myself back through the undergrowth and walk down Sunset Drive to the village. I would be just as hard to find if I spent the night in the church, which Father McFall was leaving open for people who wanted to thank God or be sorry about the bomb.

  Something horrible with a huge wingspan passed directly over my head and I was back in the nightmare where Nonie flew through the air and shrieked before breaking apart at the bottom of the crater, one dismembered leg twisted sideways in its old-lady shoe. Only this time I was the one who shrieked. Why was life so treacherous and unfair? It was enough to make you want to stop being in it.

  A circle of light jittered back and forth across the treetops. “Helen? Is that you?”

  Don’t answer. Give the false-hearted more time to imagine the world without you in it.

  Louder: “Helen!”

  The tree frogs abruptly ceased their night chorus. The bouncing circles of light grew larger. “Are ye in there? I’m sure I heard you.”

  Now my own mind was double-dealing me: Had I known all along he was going to come, like the soldier who finally wins the princess out of the coffin before she can destroy any more men? Or had he come too late for it to count?

  The light played back and forth over the floor of the crater. “Will I find you down there?” he called. “Or are you wanting me to jump so you’ll have time to hide somewhere else?”

  “I’m not hiding, stupid,” I said in my normal voice. “I hurt my leg climb
ing down.”

  “Ah, the Sphinx speaks. Is it bad, the leg?”

  “It’s stopped bleeding, but I’m resting it awhile.”

  “Good idea. Where are you resting?”

  “At that sassafras tree.”

  The light skittered about until it found my face. “Ah.” The voice could not conceal its relief. “Will I come down?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  The light shut off. There were no footsteps, just the rustling dark, and then he swung down and was sitting beside me.

  “How did you do that?” I said. “I didn’t hear you coming.”

  “Didn’t I spend two years training to outsmart my enemy in the dark?”

  “Am I your enemy now?”

  “Let’s have a look at the injury.” He played the flashlight, which I recognized from our hardware drawer, on my legs. “Which one is it?”

  “The one with the blood on it.” I stopped myself from adding “silly.”

  “Hmm. Can you walk on it, or will I have to carry you home?” I caught something less than playful in his tone.

  “It’s more of a cut than anything else. I’d prefer to walk.”

  “Up you go, then. And no, you’re not my enemy, but just imagine yourself handcuffed to me as my prisoner of war till I get you home.”

  He lugged me up the side of the crater and then towed me ungallantly along behind him. What a disaster this place was after dark. It was hardly possible to imagine my father and Willow Fanning running away at night, even though it hadn’t been such an obstacle course back then. How naïve of Flora to have thought we could “repair” such a jungle as a “surprise” for my father at the end of the summer.