Flora A Novel

XI.


Nobody until Flora had called my childhood strange. Even Annie Rickets had never implied that. And what right had Flora of all people, dumped in her infancy by a runaway mother, growing up in a house partly owned by the maid, to pronounce on what was strange? Every time she opened her mouth about the Alabama life she had shared with my mother, out came something I wished I hadn’t heard. If, according to Flora, my mother always got tired of her favorite clothes and her favorite things, what would have happened to me if she had lived? That is, if I had been among her favorite things. Which would have been worse? Never to have been a favorite or to become an ex-favorite, cut in half and passed on to someone left behind?

As I crept down our treacherous driveway in my blue Keds, I tried not to feel terrible about hurting Mrs. Huff’s feelings. I also wished I could recall a time I had walked down this driveway with somebody other than Flora. Our two recent walks had somehow turned it into a Flora thing, displacing better walks, walks with Nonie to the mailbox, or possibly even further back, with my mother when I was two or three. Did my mother ever hope for any mail? For years Flora’s letters had lurked in our mailbox, her young, indiscreet letters that Nonie had destroyed after reading. Before that, Flora had probably written to my mother, saying how she missed her, splashing adolescent tears on the stationery. It was sickening to think of the younger Flora’s fat envelopes arriving year after year, biding their time until she had outlived both Lisbeth and Nonie. Now she was in our house, awaiting envelopes addressed to herself in our box, hanging her clothes in our closets, the awful truncated dress being the worst: the upper half of my mother cut away because Flora’s “bustline” was way too big. Lisbeth, in her few unsmiling photos, was wand-thin and had no bust to speak of, but now I worried which way I would go. Would I soon be pooching out in front like Flora? So far, my chest was flat, but one of Annie Rickets’s boobies, as she called them, had risen under the nipple like an insect bite. “What if the other one never pops out?” she had said and laughed. “Do you reckon they’ll put me in the circus?”

Though I knew it was too early (Old One Thousand was last on the postman’s route), I checked the mailbox. A black ant inside sped off in a snit. Maybe later today there would be a letter from my father. (“Hope I wasn’t too fierce about the quarantine, Helen, but I want you to grow up to be a beautiful girl with nice straight legs …”)

Though beautiful was not a word my father used about people. He liked his compliments to have room for reservations. Flora had become a “looker,” he’d said, “but certainly not in your mother’s style.” Did he think I was becoming a looker, which, when he said it, carried a faint whiff of vulgarity, or was I developing in my mother’s style—which was what? Mrs. Huff, a commenter on everybody’s looks, was always telling Rachel if she would hold herself like me she would convey “a certain something.” Conveying a certain something sounded more like the style my father would approve of, but it didn’t mean you were good-looking. Mrs. Huff had also said, “You take after your grandmother,” and Annie Rickets had said my grandmother looked like a mastiff driving a car. Brian Beale, during his asking-for-my-hand proclamations, regarded me with complacent possessiveness, but had never actually mentioned looks. (It was painful to think of him, especially since I still hadn’t written any letter.) “That certainly suits you,” Nonie would say in the store. “It’s very pretty on her,” the saleswoman would chime in. “It’s smart,” Nonie would emend. “It’s elegant.” When one front tooth came in sticking out a little, the dentist said, “If Helen can get in the habit of pressing her finger against that tooth when she’s reading or studying, we can most probably avoid braces.” A year later he pronounced that our tactic was working and that “my beauty” would not be compromised. But he said it in a jocular way.

How would my father describe me to someone? (“Yes, I have a daughter, Helen; she’s going on eleven. She’s—”) For instance, to his roommate, Harker, the master welder, at Oak Ridge. But the roommate was deaf and laughed at everything my father said.

I had no plan for my walk. Walking was not something I normally did. None of us walked, really. The main reason I was doing it was to escape from Flora and get some of myself back. I headed downhill because that was the way we always headed in the car. The other way, uphill, soon turned into unpaved road through forest being thinned but still undeveloped, a road mostly used by loggers, which eventually joined up with a county highway on top of the ridge.

But I was not getting myself back. To the contrary, I felt myself slipping away. A veil seemed to rip and through it I could see Sunset Drive going on exactly the same without my needing to exist. This thought made me queasy.

What would happen if I didn’t return? Flora would slide and scuttle down the driveway, yipping at the ruts, until at last she would come upon me, standing like a statue on Sunset Drive. “There you are, Helen! I was beginning to get worried.” And then she would come closer and see that my eyes were blank, like a statue’s. There would still be my features, but my life spirit would have departed. I’d be like the little girl who turned into a mannequin.

Then I was so close to the rip in the veil that I was more on the other side of it than I was in myself. It was like being conscious of losing my mind at the exact moment I was losing it. I reeled and felt faint. I couldn’t even find words to think about what was happening to me.

Move over in the shade, darling. You still know what the shade is, don’t you? That’s right. Now sit down on the ground and let everything go.

There was a back-and-forth shushing of leaves, like a broom tenderly sweeping a floor. I was able to hear the tender sweeping without needing to know if I existed. Then a loud roar drowned out the gentle shush and there were footsteps and someone said, “Hello, hello? Is anyone there?”

Finn’s boots creaked as he squatted down in front of me. A strong, sweaty smell came from him. His narrowed green eyes scrutinized me with concern. Parked across the road was his three-wheeled motorcycle with its storage trunk.

“We didn’t order anything,” I said.

“You didn’t, no, but I was bringing you something anyway. What the bejesus were you doing?”

“I was just …” I started pushing myself up from the ground. His strong hands hauled me the rest of the way.

“When I came around that curve, you didn’t look up or move a muscle. You were like a catatonic.”

“A what?”

“Someone who’s been shocked so bad they sit staring at nothing all day. I’ve seen soldiers like that.”

“I was just thinking, is all.”

“And were they productive, your thoughts?”

He was smiling now, the skin around his eyes had little crinkles, and it struck me how sadly timed things could be. Here I had been planning for days what I would say to him when he came again and wishing Flora and I would run out of things so we’d have to order again. But just now I was trying to hold on to the voice that had spoken of shade and called me darling, and the scary thing that had preceded that, the horror of losing myself, which was already fading. And here he was, actually asking me about my thoughts, which nobody had bothered to do since Nonie. But as they were not thoughts I could tell anyone, I made up something.

“I was thinking about my grandfather’s path through the woods—it’s just down there. He had a shortcut made for his patients so they could walk to the village without having to go round and round on the road. Only we didn’t call them patients, we called them our Recoverers. And I was thinking whether we could repair it to surprise my father when he came home, but it’s all grown over and there’s this dangerous crater right at the beginning. We would probably need a tractor or something to fill it in.”

“Will we go and take a look at it?”

It was a strange way of putting it, like he was consulting the future.

“Don’t you have to deliver people’s groceries?”

“Like I said, I was bringing you something.”

“Me?”

“Well, the both of you. I found some okra.”

“Okra?” I repeated stupidly.

“She was so disappointed when we didn’t have it the other day.”

“They grow it down in Alabama,” I explained, wanting to encourage him to keep our families separate. “That’s where Flora comes from.”

“Ah, Flora.” He sounded relieved to have been supplied with the name. “They must grow it up here, too, because they were selling the first crop at the farmers’ market this morning.”

“I could show you the shortcut,” I said. “It’s just down there, around the curve. But it’s awfully rough in there, so we’ll have to be real careful.”

“Well, you lead the way … em, how do you like to be called?”

“Just Helen. I don’t have a nickname.” Too late it came to me that he hadn’t remembered my name, either, and was trying to get around it. “What do you like to be called?” At least I had not said his name.

“Finn is fine. It was all last names in the Army and I’m used to it. My birth name is Devlin. Devlin Patrick. Devlin was my mother’s brother who died and Patrick was the saint. There are slews of Patricks in Ireland.”

“Are you Irish?”

“Born Irish, but I’m an American citizen now. How else would I be wearing U.S. Army Parachute Infantry boots? My father’s cousin adopted me when I was ten. They were Finns who’d settled in Albany, New York, and did well for themselves.”

“Did your parents die?”

“No, but they had five kids and no money, and my father’s cousin and his wife had money but no kids, and they asked if they could have one of us boys.”

“You mean your parents sold you?”

“It wasn’t a term anyone used, but there were benefits to both sides.”

“But how did you feel about it?”

“Oh, I was thrilled to be the one chosen. I couldn’t wait. Everyone wants to go to America.”

We scuffed on downhill toward my grandfather’s shortcut, Finn half-smiling at his parachute infantry boots and probably remembering things while I imagined what I would feel if my father suddenly said, “Helen, I’ve got a proposition. How would you like to go to America and live with ———?” But I was already in America, where everyone wanted to go, and the only cousin I had was Flora—and my father was paying her to live with me.

“You were ten, like I am,” I said. “Though I’m going to be eleven in August. Didn’t you miss your house in Ireland?”

He laughed his high-pitched laugh that sounded like a cry being squeezed out of him. “What house? My brother and I shared a room with my father in town, and the girls, who were still little, stayed with my mum and her people in the country.”

“Didn’t you miss your brother? Was he jealous when he didn’t get chosen?”

“Ah, that’s another story,” he said, looking suddenly unhappy, “and that’s enough about me.”

When we got to the hairpin curve I told him about the ruffians who came from the other side to shoot out the street-light and he fell into the same trap I had with Nonie. “Why didn’t they stay on their side of town and shoot out their own streetlights?” he asked. “Because,” I said wryly, “they already have,” making him laugh.

“Remember it’s all grown over,” I warned, when we were at the entrance of the shortcut. “Don’t expect to see a path or anything. And just a little way in, there’s this horrible crater. I should probably go first.”

“I see the path, it begins here,” he said, diving ahead of me into the brush, “then it follows that old fallen railing and down there it dips out of sight.”

“Watch out for that crater. Flora couldn’t see anything when I brought her here.”

“That’s because she didn’t spend two years of her life studying the ground and learning how to use it to keep yourself alive.”

I followed behind his fast-moving boots, wondering what it would be like to be a boy.

“Now your grandfather,” he called back, “why was it he built the shortcut?”

“So the Recoverers could walk straight down the mountain to the stores without having to walk miles of extra circles on the road.”

“The Recoverers were the patients?”

“Well, they weren’t really patients anymore. They had finished with their treatments at other places in town, like Craggy Bluff, if they were inebriates—”

“Now that is a lovely word I haven’t heard for a while: inebriates.”

“—Or if they had had TB they would have been at Ashland Park, or, if they had TB and money, up at Highmount. And if they had mental problems, they would have been treated at Appalachian Hill. When they came to us they were pretty much recovered, but they still weren’t ready to go back to where they came from.”

“Like me.” He laughed. “Did you know any of these Recoverers?”

“Oh, no, they were all gone before I was born. The last one left in 1916, when my father was sixteen. I don’t think the shortcut’s been used much since. My father is the age of the century, so it’s easy to remember his age.”

“The year of the Easter Rising.”

“The what?”

“Some very bad Irish history that happened in 1916. Nobody talked about anything else when I was a boy.”

“You better be careful.” I had to pant to keep up with him. “There’s this crater just—”

But, uttering a sort of war whoop, he had already disappeared over its edge.

“Mr. Finn?” I crept closer, fearful of falling in myself. “Are you all right? Did you fall?”

“Of course I didn’t fall,” came his voice from below. “I jumped. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, if this isn’t the mother of all foxholes!”

I peered over the edge to see him dancing a little jig on the floor of the crater, his arms pointed skyward from the elbows, a silly, ecstatic grin on his upturned face. The crater was wider than I remembered from when Flora and I had seen it. Maybe because there was more light in it at this hour.

“Come down,” he called.

“No, I can’t.”

“Yes you can. It’s fabulous down here.” He was still dancing the jig with a look of mad ecstasy. From where I stood above, the hair on his head looked like sharp little orange spikes sticking up in a field of flesh. For all I knew he might still have mental problems.

“Come on, I’ll help you. See that young sassafras? Grab hold of it and swing down until you’re standing on the root below.”

“I really can’t.” I wondered whether it might not be wisest to run away and leave him there.

“You can, you can. Come on, it’s great!” He had stopped the dancing, and his sunlit green eyes glittered up at me. He raised his arms, beckoning with his fingers. “Trust me, I’ll catch you.” It seemed important to him that I trust him. He would dismiss me as a child if I ran away. My hand was already on the young sassafras. How did he know to call it that? I didn’t know anything but the limited world of my “strange childhood.”

“Now keep hold of it and step onto the root—”

One blue Ked on the root, then the other. Two blue Keds. What would Mrs. Huff think if she were watching me right this minute?

“Now grab my hand and ye’re down.”

My knees were wobbly, my heart was thumping, yet somehow I gripped his hand and was down.

“Good girl.” He shook my hand before releasing me. “I’m proud of you.”

The whole thing felt overdramatic. It was not that far down, really.

“Now what?” I tried to act blasé, though I was still shaking.

“What do you mean, now what?”

“What do we do now that we’re in this hole?” I sounded just like my father.

“What do we do?” he cried incredulously. “We admire it. Man, what I could have done with this hole. And I didn’t even have to dig it. It dug itself. Just imagine, all those days and nights and years since the uprising, since your father was sixteen, this amazing thing was quietly creating itself, slowly sinking and shifting and forming itself into this lovely shelter. Why, a body could set up housekeeping here. There’s spaces for little side rooms, and that lovely moss for the floor, even some little flowers for natural wallpaper, and twining vines for curtains. And smell the lovely earth odors, all the odors coming from the pores of the earth. And so dry. In a foxhole like this I would not have come down with pneumonia.”

I was getting worried. Not only was I standing in a hole in the woods with a man I barely knew but he might be crazy. He’d admitted himself he’d had mental problems after the collapsed lung.

“Well, I don’t think my grandfather had it in mind to create a foxhole,” I said, taking on the voice of reason. “Or even a future foxhole. This would all have to be filled in if we were going to fix the path.”

Elation and playfulness drained from his countenance. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Your wanting to surprise your father. I got somewhat carried away, didn’t I?”

“Oh, no … I can see … I mean, if someone’s just come back from having to dig their own foxholes in the war, this must seem like …” I trailed off, unable to think of a comparison. “I better be getting back,” I said. “Flora will be worrying.” For good measure I added untruthfully, “She gets really upset if I go out of her sight.”

With relief I watched him reassume his adulthood. “Then, up you go,” he said, giving me a boost till my foot was firmly on the root. I grasped the slim trunk of the sassafras tree, and realized I could probably climb up and down by myself whenever I wanted. It would be fun to show someone. Like Brian, who I was sure had never climbed into or out of a hole in his life. But Brian would probably never climb anywhere, up or down, again.

We hurried along the paved road to Finn’s motorcycle. “I hope we won’t have upset Flora too much,” he said.

“We’d better not say anything about going in the crater,” I said. “It’ll worry her and she’ll cry. My cousin has the gift of tears.”

“God forbid we make your lovely cousin cry,” he said. “If you ride behind me on the seat, we’ll get you home that much faster.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly—”

“Ah, you can do anything you set your mind to, Helen. I’ve seen you in action now. So climb up and hold on tight.”





XII.


How are you settling into your new room?” Mrs. Jones asked. It was Tuesday again and I was helping her change the linens on Nonie’s bed.

“Oh, fine.”

“Have you … dreamed anymore?”

I knew from her wistful tone she meant had I dreamed about Nonie. The answer was yes, but, as it had been a hideous nightmare, I weaseled.

“I’ve heard her voice a couple of times. And one night I woke up really sad and so I did this strange thing.”

Mrs. Jones smoothed down the top sheet on her side and companionably waited.

“I got her new hat out of the closet. She was trying it on when she had her heart attack, you know.”

“That’s right.”

“Then I put it on. I sat down in front of the three-way mirror and pinned it on. It still had her hatpin in it. She always carried this pin in her purse in case she felt like trying on hats downtown.”

“How did it look on you?”

“Well, I tried it different ways but none of them looked right and then I saw if I scrunched down far enough so I couldn’t see my shoulders, it was just the hat on a person’s head. And it was like she was there.”

Mrs. Jones sighed.

“It was like she was showing me how she looked just before she died. I mean how she would have looked if I had been standing behind her.”

We each plumped our pillow in its fresh case and then together folded the counterpane over them.

“That’s wonderful about that hatpin,” she said at last. “What did you do with it?”

“Oh, I put it right back in the hat afterwards and put everything back in the box.”

“That’s exactly what I would have done!” Mrs. Jones raised her eyes to the ceiling and seemed to be recalling some precious item belonging to Rosemary that she had cared for in a particular way. After a minute she added, “That little girl died, you know.”

“What little girl?”

“The one who came down with polio the same time as your friend. It was in the paper. How is your friend doing?”

“They may let him go home, but it will be a long road to recovery.” I was quoting Father McFall. The rector had “dropped by” the house on his way to the hospital and sat and talked to Flora while I finally wrote a letter to Brian that he could handdeliver. “He has been asking about you,” Father McFall explained, just short of scolding, “and I know you’ll both feel better if you send him a few lines on paper. Something he can keep and reread.”

“Unlucky little fellow,” said Mrs. Jones. “And they’re saying now it was just the two cases, not an epidemic. They may even reopen the lake for the fireworks on the Fourth.”

Would my father lift our quarantine when he heard there was no epidemic? Somehow I doubted it. He liked us where we were. “Getting on a-okay here,” he had scrawled on the back of a postcard of the American flag. “I am much more suited to this kind of work. You and Flora stay on your hill. That way I know you’re safe. Will try to call soon. Harry.”

Flora had received a second rejection and spent that day in tears, but the following day she was offered a job teaching fifth grade in a county school in Dothan, Alabama, and was now making lesson plans upstairs on the porch outside the Willow Fanning room. After my great adventure with Finn, we had had the okra fried crunchily in egg and bread crumbs and she had bemoaned her “stupid mistake” of being in the tub when Finn had brought me home. I hadn’t believed my luck when Finn had helped me down from the motorcycle and Flora hadn’t come flying out the door, but I was beginning to think it might have been better to get it over then. Because now she wanted to go over and over everything that had been done and said in my first free hour away from her.

“Now where was it you two met up on Sunset Drive … ?”

“Just before where the shortcut is.” Naturally, I didn’t tell her about starting to lose myself and having to sit down.

“And so you showed him the shortcut. Did you walk or ride to it?”

“We walked there and back and then we rode to the house.” Of course I didn’t tell her we had gone down into the crater. That was Finn’s and my secret.

“And he told you he was Irish, then adopted by Americans.”

“By his father’s cousins who had done well.”

“Did he say how?”

“How he was adopted?”

“No, how they had done well.”

“No.”

“Did you offer to pay him for the okra?”

“No. It was a gift.”

“Did he say that? Did he say it was a gift?”

“He said he was bringing it because you had sounded disappointed when the store didn’t have any. That sounds like a gift to me.”

“He said I was disappointed? How sweet. Maybe we should ask him to dinner, or would that be wrong?”

“Why would it be wrong?”

“Because he’s the person who delivers our groceries and also there’s your father’s orders about staying away from people.”

“Well, Mrs. Jones comes to the house every week and Father McFall came to the house and he goes to the hospital to visit a polio patient, and Finn’s already been in the house when he carried our groceries in.”

“Then maybe we should ask him.”

“Will you ask him over the phone or wait until he comes with more groceries?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. The phone might be the easiest. When I’m calling in our next order I could ask him.”

“But someone else might be taking orders when you call in.”

“Well, if it’s him, I’ll ask. Or would you rather do the asking?”

“No, no, no!”

“But what should I cook?”

“Everything you cook is good.”

“Oh, Helen, thank you for that. We’re not having too bad a summer, are we?”

“Not too bad.” I felt I should agree.

“I could do Juliet’s rationed pork dish. It always turns out well.”

Alabama again! But at least it was something to look forward to.


THIS IS WHAT I dreamed after Finn brought me home on his motorcycle. I can remember every detail of it still. It is one of those dreams you can spend a whole life deciphering.

I was going down my grandfather’s ruined shortcut, leading the way to show someone the crater. The person behind me was someone my age. I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl. I was being very bossy and superior and giving directions. “Now I know it looks scary from above, but it’s easy if you’re careful.” I showed how to grab hold of the sassafras tree. (“You can tell it’s a sassafras because it makes this shushing sound that no other tree makes. Then once you have a good hold of it you put one foot down on this big old root. Like this, watch me.”)

Then without turning around I knew who was behind me and it was the most wonderful thing. It was Nonie as a girl my age, when she was still Honora Drake who lived out on the farm, only she was visiting me for the day. In the dream I knew the old Nonie was dead, but this was even better. Mrs. Jones had been right when she happily proclaimed, “That’s the thing about the dead. They make you understand that time isn’t as simple as you thought.”

I had been sent this new Nonie exactly my age to play with and she was going to be better than any of the others, smarter and more fun than Rachel in her wildest dreams, sharper-tongued than Annie, more adoring of me than Brian. I felt an ecstasy in body and heart. I felt I had been set free to do anything I wanted. Without turning back to look at her, I called triumphantly: “Just wait, there’s a whole house down there, with little side rooms and living flowers growing out of the floor. So set your first foot firmly on the root, the way I’m doing, and then slowly bring your other foot down, and—”

But there was a shriek like a big bird and something dark flew over my head and landed in a sickening thump below me. Only it wasn’t a bird, it was an old woman all in black and she wasn’t in one piece. Parts of her lay flung all over the floor of the crater. There was one leg turned sideways in a thick stocking and its black old-lady shoe. I can still see that shoe, its black lace in the lace holes, the perforated design on its vamp, its clumsy raised heel. And then Nonie was calling to me from somewhere among those flung-down parts: “Quickly, darling, go in my purse.”

“We didn’t bring a purse!” I knew she meant her little vial of pills, but how could we have brought a purse when the girl behind me had been too young to carry a purse yet? Her voice was fading now, still calling for the purse, leaving me to wake with the knowledge that I had utterly failed to save the person who loved me most.

Not a dream I could tell Mrs. Jones. I had told her simply that I had waked up one night feeling sad, and then about the hat. The sad part came after I had waked up in Nonie’s bed. It had felt as though my own body had been flung down dismembered in the crater. But Nonie’s bed did the job I could not accomplish for her in the dream, it put me back together. I felt the life flowing from the center of me into all my extremities, and was soon brave enough to turn on the lamp.

Nonie’s purse was still in its place on the dresser—Mrs. Jones understood it needed to stay there—and I went over to it and took out the vial and shook out one tiny pill and swallowed it. Maybe I would die. I was still enough under the influence of the dream to feel this would be a fitting end for me. I ran back to the bed and lay down, but nothing happened. So I got up again and headed to Nonie’s closet. My own clothes hung inside now, and my shoes were on the floor. Hers were still there in their boxes. She was particular about her shoes and wouldn’t have been caught dead in those old-woman shoes from the dream. She preferred I. Miller pumps, size 8AA, in black or gray, with a three-inch tapered heel and a V-shaped vamp to accommodate her high instep. Her bedroom slippers were always narrow suede Daniel Greens. I checked a few boxes to make sure some evil nighttime thing hadn’t substituted the old-woman shoes.

Then I took down the shiny new hatbox with the horse-drawn carriages going round and round it. At first I planned just to stroke the hat, but when I carried the box over to the bed and lifted the hat out of its tissues and saw her hatpin in it I felt compelled to sit down in front of the three-way mirror and try it on myself. Experimenting with different angles I found that if I slouched down in a certain way I could visualize how she might have looked if I had been standing behind her in the store.