Since dissertation days, in fact. If Sybille Bedford was in Flannery’s book, as a kind of guiding spirit, that was not such a mystery. Anne had been the one to introduce them in the first place, one frost-bitten February afternoon, when she and Flannery had lounged together on the couch in Anne’s overheated off-campus apartment, and Anne had read aloud to her lover from Bedford’s book. She could remember the feeling of Flannery’s solid head in her lap, and her own fingers playing idly with Flannery’s fair hair as she read.
8
Some traits you are born with; no one asks you ahead of time if they are to your taste, and only a surgeon’s or a chemist’s hand can change them. Tufts of infant down will turn a Scandinavian fair and eventually fade to ash. The tiny nub of a nose will grow straight and long. (That was what happened with Flannery, anyway — with her daughter, at six, the nose was too soon to call.)
Other elements, Flannery reflected as she began to get ready to face the world, were within your control. Your honesty, with others but as crucially with yourself; your willingness at intervals to scrub off the limescale of self-deception before it caked so thick you could not see who you had become. Your capacity to stay calm and not flail in emergencies real (a direly ill friend) and imagined (was my child just snatched from the supermarket?). Your ability to amuse and forgive yourself.
Flannery was aware that she could be, even now, awkward or ridiculous. It was hard to miss. She could share a cookie with Willa, and after brushing clean her daughter’s dinosaur T-shirt discover that her own was coated with crumbs. She once gave a decent sales pitch to a pompous bow-tied gentleman at one of Charles’s openings, only to realize from the man’s smirking response that he was one of the gallery’s co-owners. When teaching, Flannery had learned that however thirsty she got, it was a bad idea to have any kind of drink with her, as she was likely to send it flying, spilling over someone’s manuscript pages as she gestured to make a point.
Luckily, these misadventures tended to make Flannery laugh now. Charles’s patience was strained by his wife’s clumsiness — ‘Maybe keep your hands in your pockets, Beauty?’ he breathed with slight threat into her ear when they visited a painter friend’s cluttered studio — but Flannery saw no point in hating herself for this quality any more. She had tried that for years, and it hadn’t gotten her anywhere.
Before Flannery left the Den for what she thought of as ‘the wretched lunch’ she tried to eliminate any rogue sources of embarrassment: she was freshly showered and her teeth were clean; her button-down blouse was blemishless and dark enough to shrink the risk of dismaying sweat stains. Her brown leather purse, if in no way chic, was at least not bursting visibly with tampons or snack packs of cheddar bunnies. She looked, in her room’s mirror, like an adult, a competent one. She resembled a writer. She might even still be considered pretty, she thought charitably, if the light did not catch the fret lines about her eyes too harshly. Maybe the other assembled women authors would take her seriously, and have no suspicions about the indignities or crushed confidence she had fled.
‘Oh, who am I kidding?’ Flannery muttered aloud, as she strode up the broad street toward Regent College, where the lunchers were to gather. She knew perfectly well, as did her silent audience, who she was trying to impress. One person above all. It wasn’t a secret. Not from herself, it wasn’t.
‘Whom,’ Flannery corrected herself. ‘Whom am I kidding . . . is that it?’ That didn’t sound right either, she thought as she stepped through the gateway of the Georgian college and toward the dining room. Unfortunately as she stepped Flannery failed to notice the two-inch wooden frame jutting up into the open doorway, caught it with the toe of her boot, staggered, skidded forward — and fell lengthways along the abrasive flagstoned ground.
It was hard to laugh initially, as Flannery had an animal sense that she had been watched as she fell, and besides, she had hurt herself, a bit. Her purse flew into a muddy flower bed, her wrist took the brunt of her weight, and the knee of her trousers was scuffed.
‘God. What an idiot!’ She looked up, embarrassed, sure of what she would see. Those unforgettable green eyes gazing at her, under a bemused raised eyebrow, as Flannery reenacted an exaggerated, literal performance of their first encounter. I fell for you, Anne. Get it?
But instead it was a solid, pioneer-built woman with pewter-shaded hair and a friendly face who reached her. ‘Do you need a hand?’ This was Margaret Carter, Flannery knew. ‘They’re hellishly slippery, these stones . . . Are you Flannery?’
‘Hi. Yes.’ Could there be any doubt? Would any other Woman Writer make such an entrance? ‘It was that ledge in the doorway.’ Flannery tried at once to pick up her purse, straighten her jacket, and pull the trouser leg back down over her boots. ‘I’m sorry for the slapstick routine. Glad to meet you.’ She brushed off her grit-embedded wrist to shake her host’s hand, thanking God, silently, that Margaret Carter wasn’t Anne.
‘Not at all!’ Margaret said. ‘We’re so pleased you’re part of our conference. It’s a long way for you to come.’
She meant it literally, of course. Margaret Carter could not have known just how far Flannery had traveled to arrive here — counting internal as well as external miles. The two women kept on that logistical level, as Margaret led Flannery toward the dining hall. They chatted about the Faustian bargain of taking the red eye (‘Yes, you get an extra day, but you lose your soul in transit,’ Margaret noted) and the drugged wooze of jet lag — but the real ground covered was their immediate mutual respect and liking. Margaret Carter, who might have been a literature scholar skeptical about someone who had written a ‘memoir’ at twenty-six, or a cartoonish character wielding old-fashioned gender politics like a seventies hairband, was neither. She was a bright, energetic bespectacled woman with a warm, inclusive humor, and no need to show off. She wore a loose linen jacket and jeans, which put Flannery at her ease, and her pleasure in Flannery’s arrival appeared sincere. Part of Flannery’s fog lifted.
‘I gather,’ Margaret mentioned as they approached the hall, ‘that you were a student of Anne Arden’s, as an undergrad?’
‘Oh!’ Flannery put her hand to her mouth, as if to stop any compromising words from getting out. ‘Well, not her student exactly, but . . . right, when I was a freshman, she TA’ed for Professor Bradley’s class, and I took that class. But not in her section.’ Flannery heard herself covering up again, after all these years. Burying the dangerous information about Anne and her, like an unfired pistol, deep in the sand.
‘Martin Bradley!’ Margaret exclaimed. It was a great detail to land on. ‘What a character. He was just winding down, after the better part of four decades, when I first started teaching here. His were the glory days of the department.’ She gave a deprecating laugh. ‘Foucault coming to read, Derrida guest-lecturing. The golden era.’
As they approached two black-painted swing doors, a couple of hoodied undergraduates exited, on a wave of familiar dining hall aroma: melted cheese and build your own burrito ingredients, murky soup and toasted bagels, all over a stringent undernote of bleach.
‘Glory days,’ Flannery echoed. ‘I remember.’
9
‘Anne’s a good friend of mine,’ Margaret continued.
‘Really? How . . . how is she? I haven’t . . .’
But they had arrived at a broad, chipped, heavily varnished table, that bore its burden of a thousand undergraduate plates as a weary mule does its sacks of corn — around which a cluster of recognizable women ate and talked. Andi Chatterjee, her face colorful and camera-ready, spoke with the comfortable volume of someone who might later repeat her best lines to her million followers on social media. Beside Chatterjee sat Ellen Kessler, scarcely aged and carrying the weight of her achievements lightly, along with a tidy string of pearls and a silk scoop-necked top. There was Li Mayer, laughing confidently — the woman had nothing but confidence — as she tried to jolly the thi
n, almond-skinned woman beside her (Jefferson), who was a self-contained elegance next to Li Mayer’s burst and bubble. Flannery looked at the four women avidly, but could not see . . .
‘We’re not all here yet,’ Margaret Carter said, den-motherishly. ‘Anne’s coming later today, and Melissa Green too. The New Yorkers are the last to show, of course. Let me introduce you. This is Flannery Jansen . . .’
Flannery helloed and smiled, her disappointment simultaneous with a hot flush of relief. I don’t have to look or sound good for her just yet. I still have time to pull myself together. Yet the news that this was for the moment an Anneless event also instantly drained what energy Flannery had summoned. It was as though she had expended all her social coin on the amiable Margaret Carter, and now, broke, she was faced with this phalanx of famous names.
However, she was here now. She had apparently walked in ‘just as we were beginning to play the autumn guessing game about who’ll get the Nobel this year, in literature,’ Kessler said. The phrase ‘guessing game’ made Flannery think of Willa, and she had a sudden, sharp pain of daughter-missing, a quick blade in her side. The names of a Japanese novelist, a German one, and an American were tossed in the air like balls by a juggler. The drastic gender imbalance in the list of past prizewinners was noted. Doris Lessing’s award was fondly recalled, and Chatterjee did a note-perfect rendition of Lessing’s receiving the news, filmed as she climbed out of a London taxi: ‘Oh, Christ,’ with genuine exasperation, followed a minute later by a wry facing of the journalist: ‘Right. I’m sure you’d like some uplifting remarks of some kind.’
Flannery had the wit to use this as a segue to talking with Lisa Jefferson, next to her, about the need for a Poet Laureate to be ‘uplifting’ (‘It must be quite a weight?’) and thereby avoid talking about herself. When everyone stood for coffees she felt she could, without blame, make a break for it. The Women Writers nodded their farewells, and Margaret stood and embraced her, confirming Flannery’s sense that they might become friends. On her way out of the college, not that anyone was watching now, Flannery goose-stepped over the ledge with exaggerated clearance and exited into the mercifully writerless street.
10
Grand Central station was, in its way, a church. It was hard not to respond to its Beaux Arts majesty, the sloped celestial ceiling, and shafts of light pouring through the great high windows as if from God. Santa Maria would have felt at home here, too, Anne guessed. If there had been a few angels around the place, instead of outsized crystal chandeliers.
There was always a coming down from that soul-expanding hall into the drab reality of the commuter train. Ticketing and waiting areas often do that, Anne thought: promise so much light and air, though the planes or trains usually lack both. Once settled in a blue vinyl seat, she was resigned to a couple of unlovely hours, and thought of the difference of this multi-stop journey. From the carriage, after traveling through vibrant, historic Harlem, watch as New York City changes to its sprawling outlying suburbs and then transforms into wealthy Connecticut. At our first stop, sleek Stamford, you may disembark if you like for a stroll around this bustling bedroom community, and sample local delicacies such as peanut butter pie . . .
Anne gazed out the window at the moving landscape. She was nervous. This was why she was playing uncharacteristic games with herself. Why ignore the source? Face it down. That was what Anne was known for doing. In her work, and in her life.
She pulled A Visit to Don Lennart from her satchel, and flipped it over to look at the postage stamp-sized author photograph. A small black and white face with a bright, deflecting smile — Flannery had always had a warm Californian beam, though Anne came to appreciate the beauty in her when she was serious, too, and not trying so hard to please, to be nice.
This author had waited for Anne in a train station, once. At dawn. The one Anne was on her way to right now. New Haven. The two women scarcely knew each other, had gone out for a drink just once, though the girl wore her adoration like a hapless puppy. She was smitten. You couldn’t miss it.
New Haven’s station had grand heights by then, too. When Anne first visited the campus, the train station had been a maze of cramped underground tunnels, to one side of the original abandoned building. It was the time in the eighties when up and down the East Coast the great cities, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, and even New Haven, were restoring stations to their former old-world elegance. One after the other they emerged from their dire seventies shells — something like the way a person might shed her restrictive Midwestern skin and discover her more cosmopolitan self.
Anne remembered catching sight of the tousled sleeping figure on one of the polished-wood benches in the station. Did she know that hapless student? She shook off the question in order to reach her train to New York on time, but once on board she heard her name called out. A wild-haired girl was on the platform with something for Anne. Pale in the November morning light, and slight in proportion to the station’s dimensions, yet with a passion that was great, and bold, written on strips of paper in her yearning poem, and hidden like clues in the pages of a book she had brought Anne for her journey.
Anne had sat on a train much like this one then, heading the other way, wondering what she had done to inspire this old soul. ‘Being a muse,’ she later joked to Flannery, ‘is a big responsibility.’ She had spoken this, no doubt, with a kiss, or a fondling, the playfulness of mutual infatuation. As Anne’s work intensified, though, along with the intensifying adoration of the eager freshman, the line became less of a joke. Anne could not be as much for Flannery as Flannery wanted her to be. I can’t hold everything, babe. I may contain multitudes, but only my own. Not all of yours, too.
Anne never regretted leaving Flannery. There had been no other course. She was deeply in love with Jasper, the man of her life. But as Anne moved toward a gathering of people being encouraged to write the world, she thought of that distant girl, that dawn, that poem.
There was no reason to be nervous.
11
Flannery was no longer used to the bite in the air, though it helped her shake off her sleepiness to feel it again. She walked by the marbled incandescent lightbox of the manuscript library, along the wide grassy walkways beside high-ceilinged classrooms where as a kid she had first ingested Kierkegaard and Hegel, Auden and Rich. Flannery’s present still pressed in close, but as she ambled, she felt her past wash over her like a brief spring shower. She had found adulthood here. (How was Willa? Charles had gotten her to school, she knew that much, surely a good holding place for the next six or seven hours.) That feisty, rebellious self she had been in her thrift shop blazers and drainpipe jeans, a look she took back home to California on vacations, with mixed response from her mother and cousins. (She thought of Charles’s irritable text message about her mother’s ‘interference’: ‘Is she really staying here every night?’) Flannery knew that young woman she’d been the way you know a character in an old familiar children’s book, but the river of experience between them now, broad and loud as freeway traffic, made it difficult for the two to communicate. (A short voicemail from the school to say that Willa had arrived without a lunch but they would provide her with one, no problem.) Their voices got lost in the sounds of the current. She thought of those dinner table games — what would you tell your earlier self if you could? You’re going to become more confident, you will go far, you’ll have success. OK? And then you’ll turn a corner, your life will change, there will be the miracle of a new person. Not all of it’s good, but I don’t want to wreck it for you.
And the younger self? What would she say forward in reply? Cool. Just don’t go so far out there you disappear.
Her cell phone rang; she took it from her pocket, saw Charles’s number and answered it, teeth clenched, then her husband was with her and the younger ghost Flannery evanesced.
‘Hi. How are things going?’ It was best, she knew, not to mention her mother, o
r the message from the school, anything that might set him off.
‘I’m just trying to park. This fucking city. I wish all these tech brats would just go home. Or move to Palo Alto. Fine. You want to build computers, or establish start-ups or a billion-dollar social media empire? That’s fine. Go ahead. Just go and do it in fucking Mountain View, please, and leave us alone.’
Flannery held the phone some distance from her ear as he continued for another paragraph or two. When there was a pause, she brought the phone closer again. ‘How’s Willa? I loved the breakfast pictures.’
‘Oh.’ Charles allowed himself to be redirected. ‘She’s great. We’re having a fantastic time together. We made breakfast sculptures this morning.’
‘Yeah, you sent pictures. They were very sweet.’
‘The kid’s meticulous. I mean, she has an engineer’s mind. I made us waffles’ — meaning toasted, from the freezer — ‘and put out a bowl of berries, and so she takes blueberries and places them neatly inside waffle-squares, then balances the waffles on four support frets of strawberries. On her request, I gave a decorative spritz of whipped cream on the top, and then she drizzled maple syrup over the whole thing.’
‘It looked delicious.’ Flannery suddenly had a surge of hunger.
‘It was. The kid’s a genius.’
‘She’s got to be.’ Charles might not hear the irony in Flannery’s voice, but it didn’t matter. He had always enjoyed the reflected glory aspect of parenthood. ‘Well,’ Flannery said. ‘I’ve met some of the people. The first real event is later, though.’
‘Oh, thank Christ!’
‘You found a parking spot?’
‘Yeah. Come on, Mrs. McGillicuddy, you and your Buick can move along now. Listen, I gotta go, Flan. Love you. Have a great time.’
And he hung up, leaving a spacious silence in his wake.
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