Another story came to her—one her father had told her about Sidney Carpenter. He’d been so disgruntled with the college a few years back that he’d become a Deep Throat for The Darwin Witness, the student newspaper, leaking bits of administrative gossip to the reporters, enumerating the excruciating minutiae of the endless faculty meetings, telling them who exactly had been the dissenting vote at some beloved associate professor’s tenure decision. How had a man who so loved words, a man so enamored of the subject of his work, come to feel such an equally exquisite loathing for the institution that supported his devotion? What was wrong with this place—this corrosive, embittering bastion of enlightenment?
Flora counted and dreaded down the days to fourth grade. The counting made it come quicker, and the dread. School resuming—the ostensible, official return to normal life. But Georgia would not be there. Georgia was home from the hospital but still in bed. Flora pictured her in her purple room plastered into a full-body cast covered in marker—loving notes of encouragement, none from her. Almost everyone from school had visited Georgia—everyone but Flora. The class made her a giant “Get Well Soon” card, and while the other girls scrawled how terribly they missed her, Flora simply signed her name, “FLORA,” as if they hardly knew each other.
Flora loved her new teacher, Kate, who was slow to smile, but when she did, when you made her, it made you feel important. Flora’s life was thickly populated by adults now—Kate, her mother, and occasionally her father, Betsy, who picked her up from school some days and brought her back to her mother’s house, and Dr. Berry. Even Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson—in class they were studying poetry—were grown-ups, and the author of that year’s play, too, Shakespeare. The play was Macbeth, or at least Macbeth’’ greatest hits: the witches boiling and toiling, Lady Macbeth out, outing, and Flora, as Macbeth himself, performing the soliloquy of “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Was Kate being nice to her in assigning her the role, or trying to keep her busy, or was the consensus that she, of all the nine-year-olds, could most relate to the material? Of course you couldn’t call it Macbeth anywhere near the stage. You called it “the Scottish play.” If you called it Macbeth, bad things might happen. Everyone was very strict about it, especially Sarah Feldman, the tallest, prissiest girl in their grade.
“It doesn’t work that way. A word can’t control the universe,” Flora told her.
“Just don’t say it, okay?” Sarah said, as though trying to be patient.
There was no Georgia, but there was a new student in Flora’s class, a boy named Ezekiel. No nicknames, only Ezekiel. He was the only black student in their class of eighteen. He was not as smart as Georgia, but then, no one was. But he was very smart and had lived in England and, before that, Nigeria, and he had a wonderful accent that made everything sound surprising. He played Banquo, and Banquo’s ghost, to Flora’s Macbeth.
In the evenings, her mother helped her memorize her lines, Flora reading them again and again and again, and then reciting them as her mother, patiently at first, then less so, read along. “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.” Why was death dusty? Flora didn’t like that part. “Do I have to say that?” she asked.
“Yes,” her mother said. “That’s the whole point. He wrote it, you speak it. You don’t get to write it, too.”
“I don’t think I want to be an actress,” Flora observed. Though she still liked sneaking through her mother’s things, and trying on her life. She still liked spying in other people’s windows, and drawers, though now she did it alone. But she drew the line at other people’s words.
At the performance, Flora tried not to look at her father, but it was impossible not to look at him. He had come in as the show was beginning and stood off to the side, leaning against the wall in his tan suit, his tie off. She thought she could see his eyes watering; he looked the way he did when he listened to music he loved. When she got through to the end of the soliloquy without making a mistake, he let out a strong “Yes” and clapped, loudly and slowly, and then Flora’s eyes watered, too.
“Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth,” she whispered as she walked offstage.
No one in school said an unkind word to Flora. The girls in her class simply withdrew from her and banded together around Sarah Feldman. They seemed to like one another more than they once had. Mistrust of Flora united them. Over lunch, they talked loudly about Georgia, how brave she was, how she itched under her cast, how they loved to feed her gerbils for her. One day, they all came to school wearing skirts, a perfectly synchronized fashion attack, Flora the only girl in shorts. Flora noticed but hoped no one else would—acknowledgment worse than the thing itself. But Kate did notice, and she pulled Flora aside and apologized. She said she’d talked to the girls about excluding people, and it wouldn’t happen again. Flora wondered if they’d been sent to the headmaster, as she and Georgia had, if many girls had faced what had once been their groundbreaking punishment.
“It doesn’t matter,” Flora told Kate, though she cried to her mother that night and begged her to let them move. Her mother had hated Darwin before, and now she refused to leave. But from then on, she referred to Sarah Feldman as “that little bitch.”
The next day, Flora went to school with safety pins in the holes in her ears, where earrings used to be. She looked like her mom with purple hair. Her ears said other people didn’t matter. At lunch, Kate pulled her aside again and asked her to take them out.
“They look like you’re trying to hurt yourself,” she said.
“I’m not,” Flora said. “They don’t hurt at all.”
Ezekiel did not try to befriend Flora, though they were the only two to sit alone at lunch. He seemed not to need friends, and this made Flora want to know him more. How did one do that, not need company? Flora watched him and he didn’t notice her. Like Flora in the beginning, he had a hard time calling the teachers by their first names. Instead, he called them “Excuse me.” His posture was impeccable, his neck a foot long. Every day he wore a knit vest over a pressed white shirt, as though the school had a uniform, which it didn’t, which was one of the best things about the school.
“Why do you dress like that?” she asked him. “You don’t have to, you know. T-shirts are fine here.”
He didn’t answer, denying her even his accent.
Flora asked him, “Which do you like better, Africa or England?”
He was silent, and Flora couldn’t tell if he was thinking or ignoring her.
“I’ve been to England,” she told him, because her family had once, a few summers back, gone to London and stayed in a flat where the living room walls were painted black, which her mother found lugubrious, Flora glamorous. Her father had taken her to Laura Ashley immediately upon their arrival from the airport to buy a white petticoated dress with a scarlet pinafore; the perfect outfit, what Laura Ingalls would call her “Sunday best,” her “finery,” as her father called it. “I like the punks on the King’s Road,” she said.
Ezekiel said, “Africa is a continent. England is a country. You can’t compare them.”
“I know that,” she snapped. They hadn’t studied Africa yet—that was fifth grade—but she wasn’t an idiot. “I’m not asking you to compare them. I’m asking for your opinion, which you like more.”
But he had no opinions, or none he was willing to share.
Finally, one day weeks into school, she trapped him in the cargo net at recess and asked what she’d wanted to ask, what she’d suspected all along. “Was your family happier before you moved here, before you came to Darwin?”
“No,” he said without a glimmer of doubt. “We are happier now. We are very lucky to live in Darwin. Darwin is an ideal place to grow up.”
That finished Ezekiel for Flora. There was nothing she could learn from him.
15
New Routines
THE WINDOWS OF THE SPOTTED SALAMANDER, the bakery in town, had been painted in frosty shades of white by local schoolchildren with
snowmen and snowflakes, sleighs and secular stars. Two decades ago, Flora had been one of them. The Spotted Salamander was so named in honor of Darwin’s Springtime Salamander Crossing, an event in which roads in town were blocked off to make way for the amphibians’ annual migration to their mating grounds. Though not actually grounds—they mated in pools of water, a fact that Flora and Georgia had, with the silly prurience of youth, found endlessly amusing, conjuring as it did steaming hot tubs and salamanders with towels around the waist. A movement had long been afoot in Darwin to dig little tunnels along the salamanders’ desired route to provide them even safer passage. How the Darwinians cherished the lower members of the animal kingdom.
Flora was becoming a Spotted Salamander regular, having decided she needed new routines for the new year, or at least some semblance of routine, period, and her breakfasts there were not unlike the old Tuesday-night dinners at the unmemorable Ponzu in their neat, formulaic construction—though lonelier—and this time currant scones and overpriced coffees in large saucerless mugs instead of scorched shrimp, cold soda, and plum wine, the college kid behind the counter flirting with her, stamping her free-coffee card extravagantly, winkingly, six times for every one so that every other week hers would be on the house—the cheap perks of monotony. Though today she was not alone.
She had called Cynthia and suggested they meet. Cynthia was the star of her father’s journals—the “gentle and generous” C., C. the “marvel.” Cynthia possessed the poems, had what appeared to be the original manuscript. She had an inscription, a dedication, a claim. She had an interested editor. Cynthia would not disappear, move across the country, or die anytime soon. But Flora was the executor; her father had left her in charge. If he had lived longer, perhaps all that would have changed, but he hadn’t. If mutual adoration was unlikely, perhaps a bland apathy could be achieved, an enduring emotional stalemate arrived at in the place of mutual understanding.
“I was so happy that you called, Flora,” Cynthia said, emphasizing the emphatic word so to the point that Flora pictured it as she had written it in letters as a child with a long string of o’s. “I was so hoping this moment would come, when you would be ready to sit down and talk about your father’s work. I’m so glad it’s here.”
“Yes, me too,” Flora said.
“Do you have a favorite?” Cynthia homed. “My favorite is always changing. I’m always discovering some new miracle in his words.”
“Hmmm, yes,” Flora answered, vagueness her only weapon against Cynthia’s enthusiasms. She admired her scone. “I know what you mean.” But Flora did have a favorite, the one she returned to, trying to make sense of it, the one that stood out from the others as a work not of self-reflection or narcissistic adoration, but of imagination and empathy, that on her first night of reading she’d put aside to think about later, the one poem she felt sure Cynthia would never mention, but which Flora could now recite: the one called “The Wizard.”
“How would you describe his style?” Cynthia asked.
“What a good question,” Flora said, looking deeply into her paper napkin.
“Lyrical, certainly. Scholarly, steeped in the English tradition,” Cynthia offered. The bakery was overheated, but she wore a long knit scarf coiled around her, this one an orgy of magentas—too many days in gardens had chilled her blood.
“Umm,” Flora said. “Yes.”
“But how would you put it?”
“I was surprised by them, I think.”
“Really? I think of them as being so entirely, so fully him.”
“I wasn’t expecting them to be so … so steamy.”
“Oh.” Cynthia smiled more to herself than at Flora. “Some of them are steamy.”
“I guess you never expect to gain access to your father’s erotic mind in that way.”
“No, you don’t,” Cynthia said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Flora watched as Cynthia considered this new perspective, her perspective. The moment didn’t last long.
“But they were also richer than I expected them to be,” Flora went on, the sudden lift, the pleasure in talking about him. “His writing, it’s musical—or, more specifically, it strikes me as choral, with many voices singing different parts. He used to listen to this ancient choral music. I forget the composer and the exact era, but it had forty-seven different parts or something, dozens of singers singing in their own voices, each part small, but the cumulative effect huge, grand. His work reminds me of that. He was so good at voices—literally, at creating different voices. He was a good mimic. There was a famous family story of him reading The Wind in the Willows to my mother early in their courtship and doing all the voices.” Flora looked to see how this news was received, but Cynthia, a great nodder, was nodding at almost every word Flora said. What was that, agreement? “When I read the poems, I can see him hearing them, if that makes sense. The writing is more aural than visual. Meant to be engaged with the ear and not the eye.”
“We must host a reading of them!” Cynthia burst out, as though the nods had propelled the words from deep within her.
Flora had shared too much. Stupidly, she’d told Cynthia what she thought. Her brief openness an error. The call had been a bad idea. The thing to do was toss the phone in the trash, to send it off to the landfill with its brother the answering machine.
Cynthia pushed: “I was just so taken with what you were saying, with the rightness of it. It made me want to hear them aloud. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”
The point was not to hear other voices reading them, but to hear his. Reading the poems to herself, alone in the house, Flora heard his voice. The poems were hers. They made her squirm, they made her mad, but they were hers. What would Cynthia do, distribute the manuscript to everyone in town? Perhaps she already had. She’d admitted to sending some pages to the editor. Likely, there were multiple copies afloat. She was handing them out on street corners. “Here, take them, take them,” she’d call out, her head bobbing like a buoy in agreement with herself. “Read these exquisite poems all about me!”
“It might be something to think about, Flora. We could get a group of his friends and colleagues—Ira, and a few others from Darwin’s English Department, and maybe Wood would come down—and they could each read one, perhaps they could each even choose the one they wanted to read. Oh, it would be wonderful.”
“He was so private about them. Do you think he’d really want that?”
“I think so. Don’t you? Something to consider—a precursor to publication. Whet the public appetite! A wonderful idea,” Cynthia said, as if Flora had come up with it.
“Maybe at some point. But not now, I don’t think.” A precursor to publication? How many different ways would she have to say no to this woman? Her indefatigability was irritating. Her hopefulness refused crushing.
“What’s the story with Paul?” Cynthia asked, a tactical change of subject. “How was New Year’s Eve? Is it love?”
That seemed so like Cynthia, making a good thing seem less so by introducing the one thing it was definitely not.
“No, it’s not love,” Flora said. “Less than love, more than lust.”
“What a wonderful title for a country song.” Cynthia repeated Flora’s words back to her in a smoky twang.
That was annoying, too. Just as Flora succeeded in disliking her, Cynthia insisted on making herself likable. “A possible profession. Maybe I’ll look into that—country music,” Flora said.
“You’re not interested in going back to the magazine?”
“I just sort of ended up there. I was interested in houses, in rooms, in the way things looked. Working with words was the only way to make my parents not think it too frivolous.”
“Don’t you think your father wanted you to do what you wanted, no matter what?”
“I mean, they wouldn’t be wrong. It is frivolous. My father cared about books, my mother cared about justice. They wanted me to care about something beyond rooms.”
“Oh, I do
n’t know. What’s so bad about frivolous? Anyway, I’m not sure it is. What could be more important to our daily lives than rooms? Think of Virginia Woolf’s great book on women writers-no small emphasis put on rooms there. And caring about the way things look or sound—paintings, gardens, furniture, sentences—it’s all aesthetics when you get down to it. Prettiness is an oft-slighted virtue, but why?”
“Did you ever want to be something else? A painter, or an artist of some sort?”
“Oh, you mean like your father’s wanting to be a poet? Your father was always a poet—that’s what he naturally was, and what he should have been in the world all along. I’m just grateful he found out before it was too late.” A silence as Cynthia looked away. Flora felt like an exhausted mother with her newborn, or how she imagined that felt—the constant anxiety that this strange creature before her was going to dissolve into hysterics. “But no, for me, not at all. No hidden easels in my house. No works on paper tucked away in a drawer. You know, so many academics, so many of my colleagues, have this defensive posture toward their work—apologetic, almost hostile to their own research—in response, I suppose, to all the malicious maxims of the ‘Those who can’t, teach’ variety. It’s such a derisive profession—the derision directed both inside and out. But I never felt that particular worry. I’ve always believed that the interpretive and analytical arts are just that—arts—and every bit as rich as the generative ones. At root, it’s all about seeing differently, about looking at the world in a new way, finding something no one else has quite struck upon before—noticing.”
A man who used to notice—the Hardy poem Ira read.
“The poems, my father’s poems,” Flora said. She wanted to make Cynthia see her way of looking. “They’re so personal. If there was a reading, or some other public forum, they could make everyone close to him feel … exposed. I don’t know, maybe it would be different or easier if they were paintings. Something other than poems.”
Maggie Pouncey Page 18