Flora A Novel

VII.


When I told Flora at supper that I was going outside to cut down some weeds with the kitchen scissors, she merely asked did I want her to help.

“No thanks, I need to do it by myself.” I was sitting at the head of the dining room table, Flora having insisted it was my rightful place when my father was not here.

“Okay, honey.” She got up and started clearing the dishes, and that was that.

I felt as though I’d gotten away with something. Every other person in my life at that time, adult or child, would have made some remark about my intention or the impracticality of the scissors, but not this literal-minded cousin. In all the years since, I have come across few people who can keep their personalities out of your business. I haven’t been one of those exceptions myself. Someone I once wanted badly told me at the end of his patience with me, “I have yet to find a person willing to let me do what I have to do without making clever comments or saying what I ought to do.”

I say Flora was literal-minded. Was that it? Was she inclined to take things at face value because she was prosaic, unimaginative, lacking in cunning? I recall her being all of those things at various times. Once when I was mad at her, I called her simple-minded, and she bowed her head modestly, as if I had paid her a compliment, and said, “I expect I am.” Later that summer I told someone Flora was simpleminded, but he said he thought I must mean simple-hearted.

Something had been left out of her, but was that something her virtue or her deficit? Was she single-hearted (not an attribute you hear mentioned much anymore, as in that old dismissal prayer that exhorts us to go forth “with gladness and singleness of heart”), or was she a member of that even rarer species, the pure in heart? I am still making up my mind.

It was getting dark when I sheared through the last clump of weeds in front of the garage door. My fingers ached from gripping the scissors. The weeds had been more resistant than expected. They had squashed easily, but were tough to cut. Every time I made another trip to the woods to dump their remains, I could hear them jeering, “We’ll be back, little girl, twice as many of us: we’ll be growing over your grave.”

Flora was listening to the radio in the kitchen and making a list of the groceries we were going to order tomorrow.

“Helen, sit down a minute and tell me what kinds of meals Mrs. Anstruther fixed for you.”

“Oh, just normal everyday things.”

“Such as?”

I was still outside with my slain weeds. And hovering just beyond them was a hospital door I wanted to keep closed. Behind it was Brian, transformed into a cripple because of my selfishness.

“What did she make for breakfast, for instance?”

“Oh, cream of wheat, oatmeal. French toast if we weren’t in a hurry.”

“No eggs?”

“French toast has egg in it.”

“But I mean—”

“And I had hard-boiled eggs in my school lunches.” Nonie always put in an extra egg for Brian. He enjoyed having to peel them. Nonie worried he didn’t get enough food in its whole state. His mother cut off the crusts on his school sandwiches, and carved smiley faces into his radishes.

We moved on to suppers. Yes, Flora said happily, she could do meat loaf and cube steak and macaroni and cheese. And she was sure she could make creamed chipped beef if she knew what kind of beef you used. Had my grandmother kept a box of recipes?

“No, it was all in her head. She cooked for her father until he married again.”

“Yes, the awful stepmother. That’s when she packed her bag and ran away and a handsome doctor stopped his carriage and said, ‘Young lady, can I take you somewhere?’”

“No, he said, ‘Can I carry you somewhere?’ And it wasn’t a carriage, it was a cabriolet.”

In all those letters, it would have been natural for Nonie to have related parts of her history to Flora, but that didn’t keep me from wishing she hadn’t. How many people could repeat accurately the things they were told? Look at that game, Gossip, where the sentence whispered into the first ear is unrecognizable when it reaches the last. People didn’t listen. Or they heard what they wanted to hear. Or changed it to make a better story.

“My grandfather was from South Carolina,” I explained to Flora, “and they say ‘carry’ down there instead of ‘take,’ when offering a ride. And he was thirty years older. She saw him as elegant, not handsome.”

Flora took these corrections with good grace. “If my fifth or sixth graders are as smart as you, honey, I will have my work cut out for me.”

I was teaching Flora how to play advanced jacks when my father phoned from Oak Ridge.

“Not much happening here on a Sunday night. Harker and I walked down to where they’re building some more houses for workers with families. Harker is my roommate. I’d say it was like being back at college, except Harker wouldn’t have been at college. But he suits me. He’s a master welder, deaf as a post, and laughs at everything I say. What have you girls got to report?”

“Brian Beale and a little girl have come down with polio. She’s in an iron lung and he may be a cripple for life.”

I had flung down this dramatic offering to get the attention of the parent I had not spoken to since he left me with the Huffs, but I soon regretted it.

“Where is Flora?” he asked.

“On the floor. We were playing jacks.”

“Let me speak to her.”

After she had imparted the information he wanted (the lake, the hospital, the little girl, Father McFall says we’ll have to take it a step at a time with Brian), she was reduced to monosyllabic yips in response to my father’s instructions. Then she passed the receiver back to me.

“Okay, Helen, here’s the deal,” he said curtly. “You’re staying on top of that mountain. I’ve been where I forbid you to go. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“As of right now you’re quarantined. Worse things than having to stay at home can happen to little girls. Like iron lungs, or death, or shriveled legs. I was luckier than most with the leg. At sixteen I had my full growth. You are only ten—okay, going on eleven—and I forbid you to risk becoming a woman with the shrunken limbs of a child. Flora has her orders, and I depend on you to help her carry them out. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Flora went straight to pieces after talking to my father. She was indulging in the kind of panic adults were supposed to hide so as not to worry children. She stumbled around blindly, tripping over our abandoned jacks, wailing a litany of her many failings, which I tried not to hear word for word because it was too upsetting: she should never have taken this job, she was not good enough, smart enough, she could never fulfill my father’s expectations, she should never have agreed to take care of me.

How could I put her together again? What would Nonie do? First she would make you sit down. She would say something soothing and reasonable, though always retaining her edge of authority, and convince you that the crisis, whatever it was, could be managed. I told Flora we should go sit on the sofa in the living room so she could relay my father’s instructions while they were still fresh in her mind. He had said he depended on me to help her carry them out, but to do that I was going to need a list of what we were supposed to do and not do. While everything was still fresh in her mind.

We sank together onto the faded yellow silk cushions that held so many associations of “talks” it was like sitting down on my past, and I coaxed my father’s injunctions out of Flora. We were not to go into the shops, not even the ones in our immediate neighborhood, or take the bus to town to go to the movies or to any place where people gathered, not even to church. I was not to go to my friends’ houses or have them to mine, and I was not to visit Brian in the hospital.

“We might as well curl up and die!” I would have screamed if there had been a guaranteed adult there to talk me down. But Flora was the one who needed to be talked down, and it was gratifying to see the influence I could wield on a person twice my age. My father had gone overboard because of his own history, I explained, but he would come around, she would see, next time he called he would loosen the restrictions; meantime we had to keep him calm so he could do his job and bring home some much needed funds at the end of the summer. As she could see from the state of the place, we could use some repair money. The pay was fabulous at Oak Ridge, especially when it was someone valuable like my father who was used to keeping order and knew about blueprints and building things. I told her if he chose to work there year-round he’d get double his salary as high school principal. And then, saving my clincher for last—or so I thought—I revealed to her that my father himself had been a victim of polio.

At this Flora perked up. “Oh, yes, Mrs. Anstruther wrote about it in the letters. Suddenly she had the two of them to care for, the doctor with his stroke and her son with polio and everyone else running out on them. But she rose to it, your grandmother did. She cooked the meals and cared for her dying husband and massaged Harry’s legs. Your mother called your father’s limp endearing in the note she sent with the wedding announcement.”

“You must mean the engagement announcement,” I corrected.

“No, honey. We didn’t even know she was dating someone till we got the wedding announcement with her note. And then I’m afraid we thought—well, never mind what we thought—but later on, Daddy figured that Lisbeth hadn’t asked us because we wouldn’t have done credit to her. Lisbeth was very proud—well, she had every right to be, she was so superior.”

Thanks to my efforts Flora had regained charge of herself. Now I was the one floundering among misgivings. I couldn’t have said exactly what in her version of things unsettled me. I knew my parents had been married quietly in our church because, as Nonie said, Lisbeth didn’t want to put her uncles to the expense of an Alabama wedding. There was an elegant reception afterward at our house, after which my father and mother took a short wedding trip to Blowing Rock in Nonie’s car, which was brand-new then, and returned to their school jobs the following week.

I also knew what Flora had stopped herself from saying, having been apprised by Nonie of the facts of life through her resourceful use of the “Social Hygiene for Girls” pamphlet that had brought my father and mother together. She doled out supplements to this story as I grew into an age to handle them: what exactly the pamphlet had said, which parts had struck Nonie and my father as amusing or outdated when they read it aloud to each other over cocktails. (“It was a sad little production, full of unintended slipups. One I particularly remember was the misprint impotent when important was meant. And parts of it were insulting. It claimed that though a few well-brought-up young women were trained to safeguard their morals by the age of sixteen, most were not. I bristled at that. What was ‘well-brought-up’ but a code for privileged? I don’t claim to be more than a farmer’s daughter, but I was perfectly capable of safeguarding my morals at age sixteen.”)

The uncles in Alabama had thought Lisbeth and Harry had started a baby and had to get married fast. But when I didn’t come along until a full year and a month later they had to find another reason they hadn’t been invited to the wedding.

It was a short courtship for my parents because from the very first evening, when they were playing cards, Lisbeth had felt she was part of our family. It was understandable, Nonie said. Lisbeth had lost her mother when she was eight, and the nearest thing she’d had to a female to care for her after that was the Negro woman who lived with the uncles.

“Well, I lost my mother when I was three,” I would remind Nonie.

“Yes, darling, but after that you had me.”

“I think Lisbeth returned my love first,” Nonie would muse. “You know how your father often strikes new acquaintances as somewhat acerbic. I was the one who brought her out, made her feel at home. She liked me, she liked my style, and she liked the way we lived. Why, that first evening, she said she’d bring her poker chips next time she came—and then blushed to high heaven because she had invited herself back—it just showed how comfortable she already felt with us. We settled into our weekly threesome—I want you to know I became an excellent blackjack player—and it wasn’t long before Harry looked across the card table and realized this was the woman he’d been waiting for all along.”

I had been considering telling Flora how my father had caught polio when he ran away with Willow Fanning, but she had preempted my story with this information about my parents’ marriage, which I now had to find a place for.

That night I went to bed in my old room. The garage voice had said I should move on Tuesday, when Mrs. Jones came to clean. I was to tell her what “the dream” had said and that she should make up Nonie’s room because I would be moving into it permanently. She was a great respecter of the supernatural, Mrs. Jones was. Her little dead daughter had spoken to her at the cemetery. “Momma, you don’t need to take the bus out here anymore, I’m not under this stone, I am at home with you.” The spirit of her uncle Al had begged Mrs. Jones’s forgiveness for wrongs he had done her as a child. “Say you forgive me, sweetheart,” he had said, “then open that window and let my spirit fly free.” Mrs. Jones had said aloud to him in her kitchen: “If you say so, I forgive you, Uncle Al, but you were always kind to me.” Then she had opened the window, and felt a great whoosh of air, and the next morning there was a big crow on the branch outside fixing her with its yellow eye. Mrs. Jones threw bread crusts out to it for several days, remembering how Uncle Al always brought her treats, and then one morning it made a strange triple caw that sounded exactly like “Bye, sweetheart,” looked her straight in the eye, and flew off for good.

Tonight and tomorrow would be my last nights in this room of my childhood, and the room seemed to feel this because it wasn’t being unfriendly anymore. Its wistful sadness was like that of a friend who knows you’ve outgrown the friendship and need to move on.





VIII.


After breakfast Monday morning Flora checked over our list for Grove Market.

“Would you like to call it in, Helen?”

“Not really.”

I wished I’d said yes as soon as she began speaking to the person on the other end, who could not have been grouchy Mr. Crump because he would never have put up with such dalliance. Why couldn’t she just coolly read off the list, with pauses to let the other person write things down?

“What, no fresh corn? We would have corn by now in Alabama. But then we planted our garden very early down there: corn, okra, spinach, peas, runner beans. I guess you wouldn’t have any okra this early either. No, I thought not. Too bad, we’ll have to do with canned corn, then. And does your meat market have something called chipped beef? Oh, in jars. How big are the jars? Maybe two jars then. And remember now, this all goes on Mr. Anstruther’s tab, he’s away doing important war work over in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We’re going to be ordering whenever we need something, is that all right? He doesn’t want my little cousin to go into public places because of this polio outbreak. Oh, and two quarts of milk for my cousin, she’s still growing—wait, let me see if she wants anything else. Helen, can you think of anything else?”

I had gone beyond embarrassment. “Maybe some candy.”

“What kind?”

“Clark bars.”

“How many?”

“Five,” I risked.

“Five Clark bars,” Flora relayed without batting an eye. “And can you tell us approximately when your delivery person will be coming? Not that we expect to be going anywhere! And you ought to know our driveway is a tiny bit rough.”

Our big event of the morning was the walk down our tiny-bit-rough driveway to fetch the mail. Flora had two letters, I had nothing. She kissed the handwritten envelope (“Dear Juliet, at least somebody loves me!”) but ripped open the typewritten one first, scanned the contents, and began to cry.

“What?” I said.

“I expected it. But still—”

“What?”

“They said no, and it was my first choice.” Bravely she replaced the letter in its envelope and scrubbed her eyes with her fists like a child. “They say it’s because I don’t drive. The thing is, someone offered to drive me to that interview, but it would have been in a truck and I thought I’d make a better impression if I arrived alone on the bus. It was this darling little school in the middle of a field. Fifteen sixth graders. I could have handled it real well.”

“But you had three interviews, so you still have two more chances.”

“I wonder if I had told a lie about the driving—I could have learned to drive later. But this was probably their way of letting me off nicely. If I had said I could drive they would have had to have come up with some other excuse for not wanting me.”

“You have to start thinking better of yourself, Flora.”

“That’s exactly what Mrs. Anstruther said in her letters.”

“Well, it’s true. Others judge you at your own estimation.”

“Her exact words! You’re so lucky to have had her, Helen. I’m such a mess. Not like your mother. Nobody had to tell Lisbeth to think better of herself. Maybe you have to be born with it. Were you born with it? I don’t know. But, being her daughter, your chances are better than mine.”

“Who cares whether you were born with it?” I asked. Yet Flora had set misgivings buzzing in my head. “You have to at least act like you have it.”

“That’s just what your grandmother would have said!” crowed Flora, almost knocking me down with a hug.

Father McFall telephoned to report that Brian was “holding his own” in the hospital and that he had conveyed my message. Annoyingly he kept skirting around my questions about Brian’s condition. “But I’m still hoping to drop by and visit with you and your cousin this week.” He offered it like a consolation prize for not telling me anything I wanted to know.

“My father said we can’t have any visitors. He said we can’t even go to church.” I was glad to be able to punish Father McFall in this small way.

The phone again. This time it was Annie Rickets, my favorite acid-tongued little friend. “Can you talk?”

“Sort of.”

“Is she around?”

“Upstairs in her room.”

“The dear old Willing Fanny room.”

“Oh, Annie, I’ve missed you.”

“You’re going to miss me a lot more.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just joking. How is it going with her?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Except for—?”

I lowered my voice: “Kind of naïve. Huge inferiority complex. Not that we’ll be going anywhere for people to notice. My father has quarantined us to the house. Did you hear about Brian?”

“I heard he was pretty bad. His acting career’s probably over, unless he does wheelchair parts. But at least he’s not in an iron lung like that little girl. So how was your week with the high-living Huffs? Did you get lots of swimming in?”

“I’d have gotten in a lot more if I’d known the summer was going to turn out like this.”

“I heard a really odd rumor about him.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Huff. Some people think he doesn’t exist.”

“That’s crazy. He’s always sending packages.”

“You can send packages to yourself.”

Though I knew Annie’s best rumors originated inside her own fiendishly inventive head, that didn’t make them any less appealing. They always had a rightness about them, like the rightness of what ought to happen next in a good story. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where you heard this rumor,” I said, and waited for her usual answer.

“Well, when you’ve got not one but two parents working for the phone company, you hear a lot. You can listen in on anything if you have the right equipment. Which brings me to my exciting news. We’re being transferred.”

“Wait a minute. Is this some more of that joke?”

“What joke?”

“What you said a few minutes ago about how I was going to miss you, but then you said you were joking.”

“It’s no joke. I just wasn’t ready to tell you yet. They’re moving us to this boring little town in the flatlands. Daddy will be regional manager and make lots more money and Mammy will stay home with us. She’ll probably die of resentment and boredom or kill us first, I haven’t decided which yet.”

“When?”

“Daddy’s already down there looking for a house. We’re supposed to move in three weeks. They’re paying for the Mayflower van and we don’t even have to pack up our own stuff. My rotten little sisters will share a bedroom in the new house and I’ll get one all to myself.”

“You sound awfully pleased.” Two out of three friends cut down in two days. I was on a losing streak, like Flora with her jobs. Only she still had two out of three left.

“You can come visit. It’s only a bus ride down the mountain. You’ll be able to stay over at my house for a change. Maybe I’ll give my room a name like the rooms at your house.”

Then she ruined everything. “But the truth is, and we’re both smart enough to know it, Helen, we’ll probably never see each other again.”


SLOWLY IT CREAKED into afternoon and I was beginning to see how the whole summer was going to be. Meals and Flora. Flora and meals. We couldn’t go anywhere and nobody could come to us. To escape Flora, who was already preparing supper, though we had hardly finished with lunch, I had gone to the garage to sit in Nonie’s car. I had been waiting very quietly, trying to summon back the voice from yesterday, when a motorcycle roar shattered the stillness. I slammed out of the garage in time to see it buck over the crowning bump of our hill. It was a three-wheeled affair with a storage trunk behind. A skinny man with pointy features and close-cropped bright orange hair dismounted, mouthing my father’s worst obscenity. But when he spotted me, he quickly socialized his face and called, “You folks have one holy terror of a driveway.” He wore khakis, the pants stuffed inside high lace-up boots.

“We’re having it seen to, now that the war is over,” I said haughtily.

“Well, it is and it isn’t.”

“What?”

“The war. We still have the Japs to beat.” He looked past me into the open garage. “Oldsmobile Tudor touring car. Nineteen thirty-three.”

“How do you know that?”

“I worked on cars like this before I joined up. My name is Finn. I’m your grocery deliverer. One thousand Sunset Drive. Sounds like a movie.”

I started to shake hands but remembered my father’s warnings. This person had been all over town delivering groceries. “My name is Helen Anstruther,” I said.

“The one who likes the Clark bars.”

“How did you know that?”

“I heard her ask you when I was taking your order. I fancy them myself.”

He wasn’t a foreigner, but he wasn’t a local either. His speech was different. On his sleeve there was a patch with an eagle’s head.

“Were you in the war?”

“I was, I was. I was supposed to jump on D-Day but I got sick in England and they had to ship me back to the military hospital here.”

“It must have been your lungs then.”

“Now how did you know that?”

“It’s their specialty. My grandfather helped them start that hospital. He was a doctor. This house used to be his convalescent home where people could finish recovering from lung problems. Or sometimes mental problems.”

His high-pitched laugh resembled a cry of pain. “The perfect place for me.”

“How do you mean?”

“I had a collapsed lung and then later came the mental problems.”

Then here came Flora flying out of the house, apologizing for having been upstairs, as if her presence were required before any two people could start an interesting conversation, apologizing for “our” driveway, and oh, what a cute machine, but such a hot day to be outside riding around bareheaded.

“This is Finn, who’ll be delivering our groceries,” I cut her off. I introduced her simply as Flora, leaving off the cousin part.

Flora plunged into a handshake, all polio warnings forgotten, and said she hoped we hadn’t weighed him down by ordering too much, we would try not to order too often.

“Oh, I have people who order every single day,” said Finn.

“My goodness, every day?” exclaimed Flora, sounding foolishly impressed.

“Many of our customers don’t have refrigeration.”

“We didn’t have refrigeration back in Alabama when I was growing up,” Flora eagerly volunteered. “Just this one little icebox in the cellar with a block of ice. The iceman brought us a new block twice a week.”

Shut up, I was thinking, but Finn only smiled at her. “I’ve got this one lady,” he said, “who doesn’t hesitate to phone the store whenever she remembers something she forgot.”

“She must be a rich lady,” I said sarcastically.

“Ah, no,” he said. “She’s a lonely old lady who’s losing her memory. But I always fit her in. It’s no trouble at all.” (He sweetly pronounced it “a-tall.”) He seemed like a kind, good-humored person, if a little odd-looking. It was certainly kind of him to pretend not to notice what a fool Flora was.

Somehow we got the grocery bags into the kitchen without her embarrassing me again, though she did keep calling me her little cousin and had started up again about the okra. I made sure Finn got a good look at our Frigidaire, which was more up-to-date than anything else in the house. This was not Flora’s Alabama. It would have been interesting to hear about his collapsed lung and even more about the mental problems, but I needed to get him away before he started dreading his future deliveries to these two isolated females at the top of their holy terror drive.


“WHY DO WE always have to eat at six?” I asked Flora, when she started rolling out her biscuit dough.

“Because that’s when people eat.”

“We never used to eat at six. We ate at all different times. My father and Nonie had to have their cocktails first.”

“Well, you and I don’t have any cocktails.” She looked very proud of her clever reply.

“But it’s still afternoon outside.”

“Go outside then. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

“Did that Negro maid make biscuits every day back in Alabama?”

“I’ve told you, Juliet isn’t a maid. She’s part owner of our house.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

“Well, it’s true. Many a time she’s had to make the whole mortgage payment by herself. When Uncle Sam dies, it’ll be all hers.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Aren’t you your uncle’s next of kin?”

“I’ll have a job teaching by then. I can make a down payment on my own place if I want one. I might even be married.”

“Married?”

“Don’t look so surprised. So far, two people have asked me.”

“What was wrong with them?”

“Why should anything be wrong with them? Because they wanted me?”

“No, no! I just meant—”

“I know, honey. I was teasing. One was a lawyer. The other owned a farm. He’s the one who offered to drive me to that interview in his truck. Maybe I’d have done better to let him. The subject of my not driving might never have come up.”

“What about the lawyer?”

“He was too old, for one thing—he had two grown children. I worked for him one summer and he was very nice to me. But I wasn’t really attracted to him.” She giggled. “He had little hairs growing out of his ears.”

I recalled the hairs growing out of my father’s ears. Rachel Huff’s mother had told her that with Nonie gone my father would probably want to marry again.

During supper, I thought about Finn, but kept him to myself. Then Flora said brightly, “I hope we didn’t go against your father’s wishes by letting that nice delivery boy carry our groceries in. Do you think we did?”

“Did what?”

“Go against your father’s wishes. But your cleaning woman is coming tomorrow, isn’t she? Mrs. Jones. She must have been going in and out of all sorts of public places, too. We can’t be expected to live completely in a vacuum, can we?”

“We’re doing a pretty good job, if you ask me.”





IX.


Mrs. Jones arrived at nine on Tuesdays, bringing back the clean sheets and towels she had dropped off at the linen service the week before. She had been cleaning this house for thirty years. She remembered the doctor in his final years, and my father as a teenager before his polio. She remembered the Recoverers and she remembered my mother and she remembered me before I could remember myself. Her own little Rosemary had been alive when Mrs. Jones started coming to our house. She still brought her lunch in Rosemary’s old school lunch box, a thermos of hot tea (which she said kept her warm in winter and cool in summer), and her own table-model radio, which she carried under her arm and plugged into the wall sockets of the different upstairs rooms as she went about her work. Starting with the kitchen, she did the downstairs rooms in the morning. She didn’t like to be talked to when she was scrubbing the kitchen floor because she said being on her knees and the rhythm of the arm motions made it the ideal time for going over her life. She didn’t play the radio in the morning, radio was for the afternoon upstairs. Guiding Light and All My Children were for the Willow Fanning room; then a silent break for the Willow Fanning half bath and the front upstairs bathroom (she considered tiled floors with their proximity to water unsafe for plugged-in devices); then on to Ma Perkins and Pepper Young’s Family in the Hyman Highsmith room; then Stella Dallas and Lorenzo Jones for the two nameless Recoverers’ rooms, whose guests had been more forgettable, except for the one who had let us down. When a Girl Marries was for my grandfather’s consultation room, and she finished her day with Portia Faces Life in his half bath, which had a wood floor.

“I admire that woman,” Nonie said. “Despite all her adversities, Beryl Jones manages to stay in control of her days. How many people do you know who can do that?”

On this Tuesday, Flora took it on herself to welcome Mrs. Jones to the house. “I’m Helen’s first cousin once removed. Her mother and I grew up together in Alabama. Sometimes she was like my big sister and sometimes she was like a little mother. Did I meet you at the funeral reception, Mrs. Jones?”

“No, ma’am, I wasn’t able to make the reception.”

“Oh, please, call me Flora. And whatever I can do to help you, just let me know. I’m Helen’s caretaker for the summer while her father’s away, but I’ve got plenty of free time for housework.”

“Oh, my routine more or less runs me,” said Mrs. Jones. “I would get all turned around if someone was to try to help. I do the downstairs in the morning, and then if it’s warm like today I eat my lunch upstairs on the south porch, and in the afternoon I turn out the upstairs rooms.”

“Well,” said Flora, “in that case, I guess I’ll go up and work on some lesson plans. I start teaching school in the fall. I’m in the Willow Fanning room.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know. I do that room first, after I’ve swept the upstairs porches.”

“Well, don’t worry, I’ll make myself scarce. I have some shelf reorganizing I want to do in the kitchen. But I already went and stripped my bed for you.”

“That was thoughtful, but there was no need.”

I lurked about while Mrs. Jones scrubbed the kitchen floor on her knees and went over her life. I tried some more of my library book, but my own life seemed more urgent and mysterious than the girl researching someone else’s old house. I walked around our house, forcing myself to acknowledge more signs of decay, and fantasized that we would somehow come into money and make everything nice again. I heard my father forbidding me to risk becoming a woman with the shrunken legs of a child, and pictured Brian Beale’s ten-year-old legs withering this very minute beneath the covers of his hospital bed. I knew I should be writing a note to him in time for postman to take it away, but couldn’t make myself do it. I thought of Finn, with his pointy features and carrot crew cut, rushing over to the lonely old lady on his motorcycle whenever she remembered something she’d forgotten to order. He’d roar up in front of her modest little house that didn’t have a refrigerator and tell her it was no trouble “a-tall.” I prepared some interesting things I would say to him next time—if I could get them in before Flora interrupted and brought things down to her level.

I materialized when I heard Mrs. Jones starting on my grandmother’s room.

“I can still feel her in here,” said Mrs. Jones, holding her feather duster aloft in front of the blinds like a conductor raising his baton.

“I had this dream.” I got right to the point. “She told me she wanted me to move into this room. She said you would understand.”

Mrs. Jones clasped the duster to her breast. “She mentioned me?”

“She said, ‘Mrs. Jones respects dreams and is partial to the supernatural.’ Those were her exact words.”

“Dear me if that doesn’t sound just like her. The dead can speak to you anytime they like, whether you’re awake or asleep. Whether you listen or not is up to you.”

“She said I was to ask you to make up her room for me.”

“Did she say we should empty out drawers, or what?”

I considered a moment. “No, just make up the bed. I’ll go through her things myself.”

“That’s what I did with Rosemary’s things. I went through them a little at a time and let them bring her back.”

“You know, I think I am growing up,” I said.

“Well, surely you are.” Mrs. Jones had laid aside her duster and started on the bed, as though being guided by Nonie.

“No, I mean I’m understanding things this summer that I couldn’t understand even this past winter.”

“Like what, dear?”

“Well, like Rosemary’s diphtheria and my mother’s parents in the flu epidemic, all in the same year. Before, I just couldn’t get my mind around it. Your seven-year-old daughter and those people from such a long time ago. It was the same year, 1918, but I just couldn’t see how they could all fit into that same time period.”

“That’s the thing about the dead,” observed Mrs. Jones happily, lifting up the mattress pad and giving it a vigorous shake. “They make you understand that time isn’t as simple as you thought.”

She let me help make up the bed. “It’s the right thing that you should have this room,” she said. “You’re the lady of the house now.”

“But I’m not going to tell Flora about the dream.” Here I had to remind myself that Nonie had considered the whole truth too much even for Mrs. Jones. Even I had almost forgotten that Nonie’s voice in the garage told me to say the instructions came to me in a dream.

“Well, that’s up to you, dear.”

“Flora is very—” I hovered between wanting to betray and wanting to appear loyal. “I’m not sure she’d be able to understand. I’m just going to tell her moving in here was something I decided to do and leave it at that.”

“Well, like I said,” Mrs. Jones reiterated, “you’re the lady of the house now.”


AT SUPPER I let Flora go on about all she’d accomplished while Mrs. Jones had been cleaning the house. In the morning she’d answered Juliet Parker’s letter and walked it down to the box just in time for the mailman, which made me feel guilty because I hadn’t written my note to Brian. Then she’d worked up some fifth-grade geography lesson plans and created a behavior chart for her class: “You know: neatness, courtesy, self-control, so they’ll know what I expect from them.”

In the afternoon she had reorganized the cupboard shelves and the refrigerator. “I kept thinking how that nice delivery boy said so many people still don’t have them and I felt positively luxurious.”

“His name is Finn.”

“Is that his first name or his last?”

“He just said Finn. He was in the war until his lung collapsed, so he’s not exactly a boy anymore.”

“You two really had a conversation, didn’t you? I heard you talking a lot with Mrs. Jones, too. You miss your friends, don’t you, honey?”

“Mrs. Jones was helping me move into my grandmother’s room.”

“Oh, well, goodness, that’s a change.” I could see she was taken aback.

“It’s something I decided to do,” I said. I quoted the voice in the garage: “It was her place and now it will be my place.”

“It certainly is a nice big room,” said Flora, “if you’re sure it won’t make you sad.”

“I’m sad already, so I might as well be sad in there.”


I COULD HARDLY wait to go to bed that night, but there were amenities to be gotten through first. Flora said I wasn’t getting enough exercise for a young person, so after supper while it was still quite light we pitched into the rutty driveway, giggling and steadying each other, and walked down to the hairpin curve on Sunset Drive where the thick woods sloped off to the right and my grandfather’s shortcut reproached us with its unsightly neglect. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could repair the path, somehow,” said Flora, “and surprise your father when he gets back. Only I wouldn’t know where to begin, would you?”

“You’d have to cut down years of overgrowth,” I said. “It would take really serious tools. And the handrails are all rotted, they’re dangerous even to touch. And someone could fall into that crater and be badly hurt. It would have to be filled in and for that you’d need to get dirt from somewhere.” I was sounding like the adult, talking the child out of an impractical idea.

Tuesday evening there was a mystery program Nonie and I liked, and Flora and I sat curled on the sofa with our shoes off, listening to the cabinet radio with the big speakers. We agreed not to turn on lamps so we could be more scared. This one was about a little girl who gets separated from her mother in a department store. They look and look for her, the store detective, the manager, the police, but she just isn’t anywhere to be found, and night comes and the store has to close, and the distraught mother lets herself be convinced that the girl wandered out of the store and the police will have to continue an all-night search through the town. But the little girl has fallen asleep behind some crates in a stockroom and when she wakes up she’s at first frightened because her mother is gone, but then all these nice, elegant, well-dressed people, even some well-dressed children, come out from the shadows of the department store and befriend her. By the time daylight comes, she has decided to accept their offer to become one of them because they have convinced her it’s a better world. In their world, they tell her, she can never get lost or feel abandoned again.

“Oh, God,” cried Flora, wriggling and hugging herself in the gloom, “I knew that was going to happen! I just knew it.”

In the final scene the mother comes back to the store with the police next morning. And in the children’s department, she sees a group of child mannequins and one of them resembles her daughter so much she goes into hysterics. But the police and the manager soothe her and assure her they will find her little girl before the day is over.

“Look at my arms,” said Flora, rubbing them up and down. “They’ve got goose bumps. Oh, honey, I hope this won’t give you bad dreams.”

The program made my heart long for Nonie. There were things about it to discuss that she would be so good at. But I would have to wait until bedtime to figure out what those things were.





X.


The way my days registered seemed to change after I moved into Nonie’s room. Events stopped marching forward in a straight, unselective procession and began clustering themselves into bunches, according to mood and subject matter. There were the things Flora said and did that slowly compiled a picture of what I could expect from her. There were my retreats into the sanctuary of my new room, where I seemed to merge with Nonie and came out thinking and speaking more like her. Was this shift in perceptions something my memory has imposed? Well, what is anybody’s memory but another narrative form?

The shift may have begun that morning, when I told Mrs. Jones I was growing up because I could now understand how her little Rosemary and my mother’s parents could have died in the same year.

Lying in Nonie’s high, roomy bed, freshly made up for my occupancy, I felt it was inviting me to stretch my legs and arms into its extra adult space and to observe life from a larger field of vision.

I was still thinking about the radio program. Flora had ingested the story at its obvious level of horror and gone to bed triumphantly caressing her goose bumps and worrying that the story would give me bad dreams. For Flora, the little girl had been turned into a mannequin, the mother saw the resemblance and went to pieces, but the policemen talked her around to believing the child was still out there in the real world and that was the end of the scary program. But there were scarier levels of the story that could exist within the bounds of the everyday world. That’s what Nonie was good at: digging down to those levels. Though she was a skeptic and had nourished such leanings in me, she was a skeptic with great regard for the suggestive powers of the imagination. That is why she could tolerate Mrs. Jones’s respect for the supernatural and allow me to listen to the stories about little dead Rosemary and the uncle once I had assured her that I did not take the ghosts literally.

If Nonie had listened to the program about the little girl, she would have enjoyed the scariness as much as anyone, but she would have seen into other aspects that were just as scary.

“Don’t you wonder, Helen,” she might have mused, if she had been lying next to me, “what would have happened if the little girl had turned down the mannequins’ offer? After all, they didn’t force her, they didn’t just high-handedly turn her into one of themselves, did they? They gave her a choice and she chose to go back with them to a place where you can never get lost or feel abandoned again. Does such a place exist, do you think? And if it doesn’t exist, what options did she have other than to stop being human?”


FLORA’S BOX OF clothes, sent by the ever-faithful Juliet Parker, arrived. As I watched her unpack her summer wardrobe with little yips of recognition, I felt she was filling our house with more inferior stuff from Alabama. When the garments were all laid out on her bed in the Willow Fanning room, I realized that I had already seen her most presentable things: the suit she was wearing when she stepped off the train, the blue dress she had worn at Nonie’s funeral, and even the few changes of clothes she had allowed herself in the luggage crammed with the Alabama foodstuffs so I would have “proper meals” for the first weekend.

Then the contents of the box had to be ironed, with Flora’s commentaries.

“This skirt came from an old dress of your mother’s, Helen. I loved that dress on her. She gave it to me when she got tired of it, she always got tired of her favorite things, but when I got old enough to wear it my bustline was way bigger than hers, so Juliet cut off the top and made it into a skirt. Now, this skirt I made myself. It isn’t very successful, but I think it will be fine just around the house, don’t you?”

“Where else are we going to be but just around the house?”

Though nobody was forcing me to hang around for Flora’s ironing and chattering, I felt a perverse compulsion to watch the room become adulterated with her belongings. I had always known this front upstairs room in its uninhabited state, kept bare of anyone’s personal clutter, except for that of the occasional overnight guest. Who knew what possessions had surrounded the perfidious Willow Fanning, what flimsy or “not very successful” garments had to be whisked away from what surfaces before my sixteen-year-old father could recline upon them and continue falling in love with a woman twice his age? Nonie’s stories of those last days of Anstruther’s Lodge had been grim narratives of denouement and summing up; there was no place in them for asides about what anybody wore.

(“So there we all were, going on with our routines, in the summer of 1916. Your father was and always will be the age of the century. I was the majordomo of the operation, as by then we could afford a cook and a cleaning woman for our patients, which we called the Recoverers. In Doctor Cam’s first establishment we could take up to ten Recoverers, but when we moved up here to one thousand Sunset Drive we never had more than four; we didn’t need to by then, they were so well paying. They had graduated from whatever sanatorium they’d come here for in the first place, which is to say they were officially mended in lungs or mind or destructive habits, but weren’t yet ready or willing to go back to where they came from. Some of them ended up staying for years.

“A majordomo? Well, she’s kind of a combined butler and housekeeper. She organizes the household, sees what needs attending to or repaired and finds the proper person to do it, though I always kept the accounts myself and ordered the food and picked up people at the train station. Your grandfather never learned to drive an automobile, which I always thought was a shame; he looked so elegant driving a horse and buggy.

“He had struck up a friendship with one of the longer-staying Recoverers, Hyman Highsmith—we called him High—who had briefly studied medicine in Vienna before he was called home to Georgia to run his family’s button factory. He and Doctor Cam were roughly the same age and they were fascinated by this new field called ‘psychiatry.’ High ordered every book on the subject he could find, regardless of price, and whenever time permitted your grandfather would go away with him to lectures and seminars.

“When your father ran off with Willow Fanning, who had been with us a year and a half by then, your grandfather and High had gone by train to New York to hear someone who had been hypnotized and cured by Freud. I was left with one other guest, a sweet recovering inebriate named Starling Peake, and the cook, and Beryl Jones. But by the time your grandfather and I brought Harry home from the hospital after his polio, Starling and the cook had fled because of the polio, and then your grandfather had his stroke and that was the end of Anstruther’s Lodge and the Recoverers. Only Beryl Jones stayed on, bless her. Let’s see, her Rosemary would have been five at the time. Poor little Rosemary. Poor all of us, really.”)

Flora was ironing barefooted. Her habit of going without shoes in the house I found somewhat obscene because her feet were childishly shapeless and uncared-for. I thought of Nonie’s visits to her chiropodist to have her long, narrow feet soaked and sanded and the corns on the knobbly joints shaved away and her almond-shaped toenails blunt-cut and buffed to a high pink sheen, though nobody was going to see them but us. I would wait in the reception room, leafing through the latest issues of ladies’ magazines with their mailing labels addressed to the chiropodist’s office. If there were other women waiting I surreptitiously examined their shoes and, on lucky occasions, their feet, some of which were beautiful and others grotesque. I would share my findings with Nonie as we drove home, and in turn she would report what the chiropodist had said about her feet. He once told her she had “haughty toenails,” which had made her laugh, but I could tell she was pleased.

Flora’s toenails were the opposite of haughty. They turned up like they were making too much effort to be friendly. This led me to wonder about my mother’s feet, which I had no memory of ever seeing. I was sure they had been different from Flora’s, just as her “bustline” had been different.

After the ironing board was put away and the motley assortment of Alabama clothes hung in the closet, it was time for Flora’s two predictable questions: “What do you think you could eat for supper?” (as though cajoling a languishing invalid with a picky appetite) and then, when that had been decided, her infuriating follow-up: “So, Helen, what are your plans for the day?”

“How can a person have plans when there’s nothing to do?”

“What did you do before?”

“Before what?”

“Well, before I was here.”

It was just amazing how she walked into these traps over and over again.

“Before you were here I was at Rachel Huff’s and they had a pool. And before that, I was still in school. And before that …” I paused before delivering my coup de grâce—“my grandmother was still here.”

Flora seemed about to bestow her gift of tears, but then actually said something new. “You’ve had such a strange childhood. I keep forgetting. You were with her so much. She was like your best friend. Tell me what kind of things the two of you did together.”

Now it was my turn to feel my eyes tear up. “We drove around, we went to movies, we went to her doctors, we shopped.”

“How about when you were here in the house?”

“We talked. Or she would go to her room and replenish herself and I would read or do homework. And then when she was rested we would talk some more.”

“You didn’t go out to play?”

“Around here there was nobody to play with.”

“Well, don’t children have little imaginary friends?”

“Did you have little imaginary friends?”

“It was different with me, with us, I mean, when your mother was still living at home. We had to help out. Lisbeth got the worst of it because she was older. I told you how she had to take care of our grandmother—”

“Yes, the bedpans. We don’t need to go into that again.”

“Well, I’m just saying. There wasn’t time for us to have imaginary friends. And even with the big difference in our ages, we had each other.”

“I’m going for a walk,” I said.

“Want me to go with you?”

“No. I’m going out to look for an imaginary friend.”

“Well in that case,” Flora said, my sarcasm seeming to wash right over her, “I think I’ll sit on my porch and write some letters and work on my lesson plans. What a luxury, to have a porch right outside your bedroom.”