Flora A Novel

XIII.


I had to flee the kitchen in embarrassment when Flora was inviting Finn to dinner after placing our order. She was going on too long, making it sound like we never had people to dinner—which we never did, but why did she have to tell things like that? I couldn’t stand it anymore when she started discussing the menu with him, making sure he liked pork and of course bringing in the marvelous Juliet, who had discovered how to bathe wartime rations in a wonderful sauce.

I shut myself in my old room. Its window was brighter for daytime reading, and also I felt I was making amends to it for my abrupt desertion. I lay on top of my old silk baby quilt Brian and I had used for reading, but didn’t open the book yet. Mrs. Jones had brought it from the library when she returned the one I hadn’t finished. This one, Hitty, didn’t look too promising—it was about a doll—but Mrs. Jones had chosen it herself, after consulting with the librarian, and I knew I would have to at least skim enough that I could “report” on it so her feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

Finn was coming to dinner on Sunday. Flora had invited him for six o’clock. I had heard that much before she started in on how nice for us some company would be and launched into Juliet and the wartime pork. I was reminded afresh that my biggest fear concerning Flora was how her lack of reserve would reflect on our family. How, people would ask, could someone as picky as Principal Anstruther go off and leave his daughter, who had just lost her irreproachable grandmother, with a young woman who didn’t know any better than to read letters from the dead woman to the funeral guests? How exactly was this Flora related to the Anstruther family? Well, she was first cousin to Helen’s mother: the two girls grew up together in Alabama. Oh, her mother, I see.”

So far, only Lorena Huff had pronounced on Flora as “that emotional girl” who had read the letters, and Father McFall probably had his own reservations after quizzing her during the drive home from church. If Flora would only show more reserve, I could cover for her, but she would babble the most embarrassing things when least expected. It was bad enough when we were alone, but who knew what she might say to Finn?

At least she had been offered a job and had accepted. What if all three letters had said no? Would my father have felt sorry for her and found it a convenience for himself to keep her on? After having given it some careful thought, I no longer dreaded he might marry her. He was too critical, she wasn’t his type, he would always be rolling his eyes and leaving the table and carrying fresh drinks up to his room. The idea of them sharing a room was preposterous. But my father was perfectly capable of keeping her with us to serve his needs. She could cook. (When I finally came around to admitting that Flora cooked better than Nonie, it made me think less of cooking.) My father would teach her to drive Nonie’s car and it would be Flora who picked me up from school. Lorena Huff would be right, after all: I would have a live-in governess.

But now it wasn’t going to happen because Flora had a job and she had written to accept and they were going to send her the schoolbooks and schedules so she could start planning. She would be gone from Old One Thousand the last week in August and my father would be back with his burnt grilled cheese sandwiches and his cocktails, complaining about his job kowtowing to small-town faculty egos and waiting to be replaced by some younger man with connections.

And why should I care about what Finn thought of Flora? From the beginning he had been “my” person, someone I had connected to before Flora flew out of the house. I looked ahead to more conversations when he would ask me about my thoughts and to future adventures when he would teach me more things and praise me for my bravery. Yet I was sophisticated enough already to perceive that he was something of an outcast type himself. He had admitted to mental problems (I was eager to hear more about those), and if you looked at him critically, as someone like my father would certainly do, he was a little ridiculous, with his sharp, pointy features and orange spikes of hair and skinny body, dancing a jig in a hole in the woods. And on the motorcycle, when I had held him around his waist and laid my face against his damp back, his rank male smell made me screw up my nostrils.

My father liked to trap people in epithets. Brian was Little Lord Fauntleroy and Annie was Lady Uncouth. Nonie’s stepbrother, in tears at the funeral home because he couldn’t “see Honora,” was the Old Mongrel. What would my father’s epithet for Finn be?

Nonie preferred an indirect approach to judgment. “Is she the kind of person we’d like to invite to dinner?” she had asked my father on the evening he brought home the girls’ hygiene booklet Miss Waring said she could not teach. What would Nonie have said about Finn? I couldn’t hear her initiating a dinner invitation, but suppose Flora had said to her as Flora had said to me, “Maybe we should ask him to dinner, or would that be wrong?” Nonie would have responded exactly as I had done (this realization cheered me): she would have first asked, “Why would it be wrong?” This response, I now understood, would have given her more time to think about the rest of her reply. And what would that have been? Here I drew a blank, though in time I would become so proficient at channeling Nonie’s responses that they would become inseparable from mine. Or rather, from what mine would have been if I hadn’t had Nonie inside ready to speak for me before I knew what I wanted to say.

But still, I was impatient to see Finn on Sunday. If only I could be sure Flora would not ruin everything with her eagerness and disregard for what should be left unsaid.

In the new library book, a doll was writing a memoir of her first hundred years. I had to remind myself that Mrs. Jones’s Rosemary had still been in the doll-playing stage when she died of diphtheria. The librarian had told Mrs. Jones that all the books in the series I liked were checked out and said this doll one was suitable for readers through the age of twelve. If all the books in my series about girls and houses with mysteries were checked out, the fickle librarian must have been recommending them to other people besides me.

I leafed through the illustrations again, the first one of the doll (Hitty) taking up a quill pen to begin her memoir. Hitty had a square face, a thick neck, goggle eyes, and an ill-natured smile. I had been able to deduce from the chapter titles (“In Which I Travel,” “In Which I Am Lost in India”) that this was one of those books grown-ups dote on because it sneak-feeds young minds with plenty of history and geography.

I heard the phone ring, but it couldn’t be my father because he called in the evening. Maybe it was Finn calling back to say he couldn’t come on Sunday. I imagined him hanging up the phone at the store and thinking, I can never get through a dinner with that excitable woman who sounds desperate to have company. If it was just Helen and me it would be different.

Flora was knocking at my door (at least someone had taught her to knock). “Helen, it’s for you.”

“Who is it?”

“It’s your friend Annie. Why don’t you talk to her on the upstairs phone? I’ve got things to do in the kitchen and you’ll have your privacy.”

“She doesn’t sound so bad,” said Annie as soon as Flora had hung up downstairs.

“Oh, Annie.” My sigh spoke volumes.

“Just thought I should let you know I’m leaving town this afternoon.”

“This afternoon!”

“They’re cutting the phone off in a few minutes, and I didn’t want you to call me up and hear ‘That number has been disconnected.’ Not that you have called me up a single time.”

“I didn’t realize you were leaving so soon!”

“I guess time runs differently up there at Shangri-la. I said three weeks, and it’ll be three weeks on Monday.” There was a frosty tone beneath her usual teasing.

“Oh, Annie, things have been so— Oh, I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything, Helen. Actually, I called to say a few things to you.”

“What?”

“Remember our lemon squeezes? You would tell me what I did that really bothered you and then it would be my turn to tell you. One time you told me I chewed with my mouth open.”

“We haven’t done a lemon squeeze since third grade.”

“No, but I remembered it and I make sure nobody sees the inside of my mouth anymore. In fact, I was having a moment of gratitude toward you just now because when I’m making my new friends in the flatlands I’ll know not to do it. So, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, but—?”

“So I’ve decided to do you a favor and tell you a few lemon-truths before I ride out of your life forever.”

Where was this heading?

“I don’t have long, so here goes. Mammy saw Mrs. Huff downtown and Mrs. Huff said your behavior had really hurt them.”

“My behavior! What did I do?”

“It’s not so much what you did as what you didn’t do. You stayed in their house for a whole week. You slept in Rachel’s room and swam in her pool for an entire week and haven’t called her since. You never even sent a thank-you note.”

Oh, God, I hadn’t. Counterattack was my only defense. “Have you always remembered to send thank-you notes?”

“It’s not your turn, Helen. I haven’t finished. You were always—” She stopped and then made a new start. “You’re smart, Helen, and I used to consider you my best friend, but your trouble is you think you’re better than other people. Mrs. Huff told Mammy that you got it from your grandmother. Who we all know went around with her nose stuck up so high a bird could have pooped in it.”

“Mrs. Huff said that?”

“The bird-poop part was me, but the rest was her.”

“That’s not fair! She’s dead!”

“Yes, and you’ve got a few more months of people feeling sorry for you. But after that, you’d better take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror.”

I could hardly breathe I was so hurt, but something told me to snatch what lemon-truths I could out of her before she rode out of my life forever. “What do you think is wrong with me?”

“What do I think? Well, it so happens I’ve thought a lot about it. Other people don’t exist when you’re not with them. We’re like toys or something. You play with them and examine them and then you put them on a shelf and go away. We don’t have lives, we’re just your playthings.”

Was this true? The idea struck home somehow. Yet there was something satisfying about others thinking of me like that. It put me out of the zone where I could get hurt.

Flora-like, my own eyes were leaking. Among other things, I felt I had not defended Nonie as she deserved.

“Listen,” said Annie, “Mammy is hovering, saying I have to get off the phone so they can disconnect it. Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Was I too harsh?”

“No, you were just being … lemony.”

“I really liked you, Helen. It’s just that—”

“I’m going to hang up now, Annie. Good luck with your new friends. And remember to keep your mouth closed when you chew.”

I hung up quietly and sat for some minutes at the wobbly little phone desk in the upstairs hall. It had been in the same spot ever since I could remember, though the phone models had changed. I was glad she was leaving town. She wouldn’t be around to blab her findings to anyone else.

But Mrs. Huff would. She was probably standing on some street corner right now, waiting to tell another mother about my bad behavior. If Nonie had been alive, I would have written the thank-you note and I would have written to Brian before Father McFall forced me into it. It was true I had been counting on people feeling sorry for me and overlooking my lapses because I had lost my grandmother.

I could hear Flora downstairs (she sounded as though she was in the living room) humming “Begin the Beguine” in breathless, hopping snatches, while she scrubbed something with a brush. What had she found to scrub that Mrs. Jones hadn’t already scrubbed?

All the unoccupied rooms were left open to keep them, Mrs. Jones said, from getting that shut-up smell. (“Empty rooms need to breathe so they can stay connected to the rest of the house.”)

The doors to the two front rooms, my father’s and Flora’s, were closed. I suppose Mrs. Jones felt that my father, as living head of the household, occupied the Hyman Highsmith room in spirit even though he was away at Oak Ridge. This was the room my father and mother had shared. It had its own porch entrance, to the south porch, just as Flora’s Willow Fanning room had its own porch entrance to the west porch.

I entered my father’s room, which smelled of furniture polish. It was the barest room in the house. After some recent falls from too much Jack Daniel’s, he had rolled up the handsome Persian area rugs and bestowed them on the two lesser Recoverers’ rooms. That left the bed that he and my mother had slept in and the bookcase he had made and an old Victorian flattop desk he had found at a sale and refinished. The bookcase held only books about carpentry or furniture and was more empty than full. Mrs. Jones had outdone herself on the bare wood in this room because there was more of it here than anything else. Trophies from my father’s public life were on display at the other end of the hall, in Doctor Cam’s old consulting room, which Nonie had made into a family shrine room. Harry’s college diploma was in a frame next to my grandfather’s medical credentials. His bound senior thesis in history (“The Decline of Southern Honor After Appomattox”) leaned against Doctor Cam’s bound volume of handwritten poems (“midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this December morn / a boy is born”). The family photos were also in the shrine room (a stiff-looking Nonie in long skirts holding the newborn Harry, a studio portrait of a younger Doctor Cam before he met Nonie, Lisbeth and Harry and Nonie on my parents’ wedding day, and lots of me in all my stages to date. There was this one photo of my mother in a fur coat squatting beside me in my snowsuit. She looked strained by her squatting position but determined to pose like a mother enjoying the snow with her child.

“Isn’t it about time,” Nonie had cheerfully suggested to my father not so long ago, “we started calling the Hyman Highsmith room the Harry Astruther room? You’ve been living in it, except for college, since you were sixteen.”

“Oh, let’s keep it the Hyman Highsmith room,” my father had said. “Harry Anstruther doesn’t live in it.”

“Then who does, pray tell?”

“You tell me.”

Downstairs, Flora, still erupting little snatches of “Begin the Beguine,” was scrubbing something more distant than whatever she had been scrubbing before. I had no hesitation in crossing the hall and entering her room. I had done this in imagination already and had progressively worked out the kinks in my plan. I opened the top drawer. The packet of letters now faced downward and the ribbon that bound them was looser than it had been when I first saw her place them in the drawer. She must have been reading them. I was able to slide the face-down top letter from its envelope without disturbing the ribbon. When you are doing something behind someone’s back, you feel slightly cheated if they make it too easy. You may even feel they deserve it. Heart thudding, I quietly let myself out of her room, crossed the hall, reentered my father’s room, closing the door, and went outside to the south porch. Shut off twice, I felt twice protected.

I read the letter standing at the rail, which was prickly with peeled paint. It took me several tries before I calmed down enough to register what was in it. It was clearly Nonie’s first reply in the famous correspondence, which meant Flora probably kept the letters in chronological order, with the first one at the bottom. I was disappointed. Nonie didn’t come through as strong and wise as I had expected, and what she conveyed was more confusing than enlightening. I was mentioned only once, at the very end—almost like a dutiful afterthought.

I couldn’t wait to retrace my furtive route and get the thing back in its envelope, though I resolved to read more of the letters whenever opportunities arose. Meanwhile I would be thinking up ways to make those opportunities.





November 4, 1938

Dear Flora,

Your news has distressed us. My heart goes out to you. It is a terrible thing to lose a parent and all the more devastating when you only have the one to lose. In the short time we were with your father, it was clear how much he loved you and looked out for you.

Of course I don’t mind your writing to me. The truth is we have been worrying and wondering ever since you left. We never heard from you after the week you stayed with us following Lisbeth’s funeral.

Yes, it is doubly hard for you, as you said, to have lost the two people you loved most within a single year. Though it has been almost a year since Lisbeth’s death, I am still fairly reeling from the loss of her. You had her when you were a child and I had her when I was old enough to be her mother. But she was more than “like a daughter” to me. She was the better, cooler young woman I wished I had been, and I loved watching her grow in self-confidence. She was one of those people who flourish best under a certain amount of protection, and I like to think we provided her with that protection. Lisbeth and I were not demonstrative women, but we treasured each other’s company and admired each other. I had things to teach her and she had things to teach us. I miss her more than I can say.

It wasn’t kind for those girls at school to say you should just tell people your father died of “lead poisoning.” Of course, as you say, it was in the papers and everyone knew about the card game and the shooting. But you know, Flora, in future when you meet people all you need to say is that your father died when you were fifteen. That is enough.

Harry joins me in sending his deepest sympathy, and little Helen would, too, if she were old enough to understand. She is my joy and my responsibility now.

Do write to me whenever you feel like it. I will always reply.

Yours truly,





Honora Anstruther





XIV.


Flora and I argued about everything on the Sunday that Finn was expected for dinner.

“I’m making those cheese straws you like,” Flora said, “and a pitcher of lemonade for when we are sitting in the living room getting acquainted. How does that sound?”

“We always offer cocktails to our company,” I said. “Even Father McFall has his gin and limewater. And my father always has his drink before dinner.”

“Or drinks,” said Flora.

“You shouldn’t criticize my father.”

“Well, I’m not, honey. It was just a statement of fact.”

Then it was how we were going to serve the meal. Flora wanted us to help our plates in the kitchen so the food would stay hot.

“Why can’t you serve the plates in the kitchen and bring them to us at the table. That way, things would stay just as hot.”

“Well, if you think—”

“It would be more elegant that way,” I said.

Then there was the matter of where Finn should sit. “He should sit on your left, Helen. You’ll be head of the table as always.”

“But the guest of honor always sits on the right.”

“Well, but on your left he’ll get the view of the sunset over the mountains. On your right, it’ll just be the wall.”

I could tell she had given a lot of thought to this and felt I should give in, especially since I had gotten my way about her serving the plates, which was how I had been picturing it.

Then there was the fuss over what each of us should wear. “My good suit seems too dressy, especially when I have to tie an apron over it.”

“Just wear one of your regular dresses,” I said.

“Or I could wear that nice skirt, the one Juliet made from your mother’s dress, with a simple blouse—”

“No! Just one of your regular dresses.”

“What about you, Helen? Have you decided?”

“I’ll wear the dress I wore to church. I like it.” It was one of the last dresses Nonie had bought for me: a small blue and white check with a white piqué collar that had a single red emblem on it like Chinese writing.

“Well, that’s the main thing, isn’t it? A person wants to feel comfortable.”

But when I stepped into the dress and started to button it up the front, there was a nasty surprise. It wasn’t exactly that I had started sprouting new parts, but when I forced the top button, I looked like a little girl who had outgrown her dress. But I had worn it to church. How could this have happened? Cursing Flora and all her tasty meals, I tore the dress off and stuffed it into the darkest corner of the closet, behind Nonie’s shoe boxes, and, after some exasperating wrong choices, settled on a plaid pleated skirt and school blouse.

Finn, wearing a suit, roared up on his delivery cycle on the dot of six. He looked kind of weakened without his paratrooper boots, and there was something about his hair that made him resemble a puppy run through a bath. He’d brought us flowers from the farmers’ market, which Flora made a great deal of ceremony about arranging in a vase, and as he passed through our kitchen he said the aroma was enough to make a man swoon. His feet in civilian shoes were small and dainty, like a dancing master’s. How sad that all of us had gone to so much trouble and none of us looked as good as we usually did. Flora had obeyed me and worn an unobjectionable dress, but she had done something extra with her makeup that made her eyes and mouth too sultry.

The cheese straws and the lemonade awaited us in the living room.

“Now, Helen tells me cocktails are always offered to company in this house,” Flora said, “so, honey, what are his choices?” Though she was honoring my wishes, she also managed to make it sound like a concession to a child.

“Ah, thank you, no,” Finn said before I could begin my recitation. “I’ve been on the dry ever since my little set-to with the lungs. However, that lemonade looks grand.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “we’d get a Recoverer who’d just been cured of TB and was dying for a drink. My grandfather said this was a tricky proposition.”

“Oh, why was that?” asked Finn, interested.

“Because the drink was like a reward but it might be just the thing to start him down the road to having to be cured of something else.”

Accepting his glass of lemonade, Finn laughed and looked at me admiringly. “Were all the Recoverers men?”

“Oh no,” Flora jumped in. “For instance, my room, the room I’m staying in for the summer, is called the Willow Fanning room. I don’t know much about Willow Fanning, but Helen’s grandmother told me she was quite a handful for such a delicate person and they came to regret taking her in.”

“When did she tell you that?” I demanded.

“It was probably in one of her letters,” said Flora. “Or, no, I seem to remember her saying something the first time I stayed in that room.” To Finn she explained, “The first time was when I came up for Lisbeth’s funeral. Lisbeth was Helen’s mother. We were raised together in Alabama, Helen’s mother and I. Lisbeth was twelve years older, but we were real close.”

“He doesn’t want to hear all that,” I said.

“I do, I do,” Finn insisted. “I find your whole setup fascinating. You two cousins up here on your private hill. And those Recoverers! You make me wish I were one of them.”

“Oh, they were long before our time,” said Flora.

“Yet she speaks of them as though they’re still in residence,” said Finn. “If I had been one of them, Helen, do you think they would have named a room after me?”

“The Devlin Patrick Finn room,” I tried it out.

“Oh, what a beautiful name,” cried Flora. “Why didn’t you tell me that, Helen? I wish someone had given me a middle name.”

“We can give you one now,” said Finn warmly, leaning forward to touch her on the arm. “What name do you fancy?”

But his sudden intimacy seemed to fluster Flora and, murmuring that she’d need to consider it, she fled to the kitchen to check on something.

The living room was filling with a nostalgic orange light, which made everything look less shabby and more historical. You couldn’t see the snags on the arms of the yellow silk sofa, which Finn had been sharing with Flora. The carpet was a warm blur of soft-patterned flowers and not a mange of threadbare spots. The windows were open to the sunset in progress and a gentle breeze ruffled the sheer curtains. The scrubbing sounds I had heard the other day, I now realized, had been Flora’s washing the insides of the windowsills.

I had chosen Nonie’s wing chair for myself and was gazing demurely down at my lap because I thought Finn was studying me, but it turned out he was looking at the little painting that hung above my chair.

“Did one of you do that?” he asked.

“No, it was one of the Recoverers,” I said, and went on to quote Nonie: “Starling Peake let us down, but he was happy the day he painted that picture.” I explained that it was the view from our house before it got blocked out.

“You could have it back, the view,” Finn said. “All ye’d need to do is top some trees.”

“It would cost a lot of money,” I said.

“That would depend on who you got to do it. I might be able to help you.”

“I would have to ask my father,” I said, like an ungrateful little prig.

“Well, of course, naturally you would,” Finn replied sportingly, though he blushed with embarrassment.

I was relieved when Flora stood over us, taking charge like an adult and directing us to our seats. “I will bring your plates from the kitchen,” she announced, rosy with her cooking, “so that everything will stay as hot as possible.”

Greed rose in my throat at the sight of the steaming food on the plate, but this was immediately followed by dismay at the recent image of myself pooching out of my favorite dress. Flora had been stealthily turning me into a fatty with her meals. Unless I was vigilant and changed my habits, my father wouldn’t recognize me when he came home. Finn ate like a hungry man who had been taught not to bolt his food. He praised each item and asked Flora how she managed to have everything including the biscuits come out at the same time, and that, unfortunately, set off an accolade to the person who had taken Flora in hand when she could hardly reach the stove and taught her everything about cooking. It was Juliet Parker this and Juliet that, until I felt I needed to put in that this was their colored maid back in Alabama.

“No, not our maid,” said Flora. “Juliet lived with us. She raised me and Helen’s mother. She was a full member of the household. Why, she’s even—”

“Where do you live, Finn?” I interrupted like a rude child, but it was better than having Flora say what I was sure was coming next: that Juliet Parker was part owner of their house.

“I live in an attic storeroom above Mr. Crump’s store. Its washing facilities leave much to be desired, but it’s convenient to the job. They only charge me for linens and utilities, so I can put away a bit.”

“What about your American parents? Will you ever go back to them?”

“That’s a lot of questions, honey,” Flora mildly protested.

“No, no, I don’t mind,” said Finn. “You two have told me something about your lives and now it’s my turn. I get on very well with Grace and Bill. Sure they would love to have me back. Bill would make me a partner in his auto parts business, but I’d like to try my wings first. I’m twenty-two—”

“We’re the same age!” cried Flora. “When is your birthday? Mine was May.”

“Ah, mine was last November, and there’s already the next one looking over my shoulder, so I’d better get cracking.”

“How will you try your wings?” I asked, keeping to the subject.

“I’d like to study engineering or maybe industrial arts.”

“And you’ve got the GI Bill!” cried Flora. “The government will send you to college.”

“Well, I’m not so sure of that,” said Finn. “We’ll have to see how things fall out.”

“But it’s a sure thing,” insisted Flora. “I know several boys in Birmingham who are going to take advantage of it as soon as they’re discharged.”

“But, you see, I’m already discharged. Because of the lung …” Finn tapped his chest. “And then I developed this other complication.” He tapped the side of his head. “Which made me act a bit daft for a while. They dealt with it out at the hospital, but I have to stay here in town and see a doctor out at the hospital once a week until he says I’m my old self again.”

“Was that your mental problem?” I asked.

“Helen, honey—” began Flora.

“It’s all right,” Finn assured her. “It happens to a lot of soldiers. Meanwhile, this mountain air is good for me, and I get to know people like yourselves. How would I ever have met the two of you if I hadn’t been your deliverer?”

The phone rang. “Excuse me,” I said, getting up. “That’s probably my father. I’ll take it in the kitchen.”

“May I speak with Helen?” a voice asked faintly. It was Brian Beale.

“This is Helen.”

“Oh. You sound different. I thought it was that lady who’s living with you now.”

“She’s not living with us, just staying till my father comes back. Where are you?”

“Oh, I’m home. But I have to go away again tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“I have to go to this place. But I wanted to thank you for your nice letter. Father McFall brought it to the hospital. It really cheered me up.”

“Oh, it was nothing,” I said bitterly, recalling my forced effort with shame. Without thinking, I added, “This has been the worst summer of my life.”

“Same here,” said Brian without the least hint of irony, which made me feel horrible.

“How—how are you?” I was venturing just as Flora whisked into the kitchen to take the pineapple upside-down cake out of the oven. “It’s Brian,” I told her. “He’s out of the hospital.”

“Am I keeping you?” Brian asked.

“No, it’s just we have company for dinner.”

“Oh, sorry. I’ll get off.”

“No, I was already finished eating. Why are you going away tomorrow?”

“It’s this place where they work on you so you can get better. I’ll be going to school there, too.”

First Annie, now Brian. That left only Rachel, whose mother now hated me. It was while Brian was telling me that his mother was closing up their house and going with him that I realized he was talking in his old way, like before he had the speech lessons. The English accent was completely gone.

“Listen,” I said. “Can I call you back in the morning so we can really talk?”

“No, that’s okay, I just wanted to thank you for the letter. I’ll be going by ambulance first thing.”

“Ambulance?”

“It’s the most practical, for now. My mother will follow in the car. Listen, Helen, you be good. I guess we’ll see each other again sometime.”

When I returned to the dining room, the lamps were switched on and Flora was serving out the cake. The way she broke off whatever she had been telling Finn made me sure she had been filling him in on my recent losses—“First her grandmother dies, then her little friend Brian gets polio, and her little girlfriend has just moved away …”—but she must have been telling about my father’s polio, too, because as I came in Finn was murmuring that it was “no wonder, then, he was being extra strict, considering his own experience.”

“Well, how is Brian?” asked Flora, who had never even met him.

“He’s going away by ambulance tomorrow morning.” A huge slice of pineapple upside-down cake, which Flora knew was my favorite, awaited me on my plate.

“I thought you said he was home from the hospital.”

“He is but tomorrow he’s going off to this other place where they will work on him some more. He won’t even be coming back for school.”

“Probably one of those Sister Kenny places,” said Finn. “It’s an intense regimen but they get results, I’m told.”

“We’re very lucky it didn’t turn into an epidemic,” Flora prattled on. “Mrs. Jones said they’re going to go ahead with the fireworks on the Fourth. Though it’s so sad about that one little girl. Did Brian say anything about his legs, Helen?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. If he’s going there in an ambulance, they’re probably not in the best shape.” I knew I sounded rude, but it was better than crying. Brian had spoken to me the way people do when they have already given up on you. I felt like giving up on myself. Flora always made sure I got a complete ring of pineapple in my serving of cake, and now its yellow eye glistened gelidly up at me: “Eat, little girl, and expand some more.”

When we were having coffee back in the living room, Finn took a small sketchbook and pencil from his jacket pocket and asked if he might draw the room to send to his American mum. “Grace would love this. She has this way she wants her rooms to look but she says it’s not the kind of look you can just go out and purchase.”

We sat on either side of him on the sofa and watched the agile pencil, which seemed like an extension of his hand, bring to life Nonie’s wing chair and the little painting above it, and then the eight-foot highboy looming in its shadowy corner, and then on to Nonie’s desk, which faced the window that used to have a view of the mountains. Finn evoked the highboy’s gloomy corner with hard, slanted lines that got closer together the darker he wanted the shadows. The branches that now obstructed the view he rendered with intricate wispy strokes. His shadows brought out the room’s spooky potential, and the erratic clutter of his branches made you feel the sadness of everything going to pieces around you. He commented as he drew: “What Grace wouldn’t give for that highboy. What a lovely little desk.”

“My father refinished that desk for my grandmother,” I said. “He likes working with wood a lot better than having to kowtow to faculty egos.”

Which really made Finn laugh.

“She wrote her letters at that desk,” Flora had to put in. “She wrote her letters to me at that desk.” She was about to call on her gift of tears when I shot her a murderous look and she pulled herself up short and offered instead, “Six years’ worth of letters. Those letters from Mrs. Anstruther have become my guide for living, why, they have saved me from—”

Who knows what she would have blurted next if I hadn’t asked Finn where he had learned to draw like that.

“Oh, it was just this thing I started doing after I came to America. Bill liked me to draw scenes from Ireland. He had left as a baby and couldn’t remember anything. And I drew the men in my company, each with some personal military object, like his helmet hanging on the wall, so they could send home war portraits of themselves.”

“You can do people, too?” marveled Flora.

“Surely I can. Will I draw the two of you?” (That funny “will” of his again.) “How about the two of you sitting side by side on the sofa?”

“No, just draw Helen. She’ll like it better if I’m not in it,” Flora told him without the slightest hint of rancor. I can still hear her saying those words.

“Maybe I should sit over there in my grandmother’s chair,” I said.

“You get to know a person when you draw them,” Finn commented after he had laid in a few strokes, interspersed by quick glances. He scrutinized me the way he had the furniture. Sitting close beside him, Flora squeaked encouraging little mmms, which seemed to be more about the drawing than about me. Once she said, “Oh!”

“What?” I said.

“He got that look of yours when you’re—”

“When I’m what?”

“Keep still,” Finn commanded.

“Can’t I even speak?”

“You can speak if you don’t change your expression or move your mouth.”

“How do you get to know a person when you draw them?”

“You catch some of their passing thoughts,” he said. “Now, do ye think you can keep your face still and just lift one hand out of your lap and lay it on the arm of the chair?”

“Which hand?”

“The right … no, I mean your left. So it’ll be the one on my right. Now unclench your fingers and let them hang loose over the edge of the chair, and would it be too much to ask you to lose the frown? Good girl.”


THE YOUNG EX-SOLDIER’S pointy face, sharp nose elongated by the shadows of the lamp-lit room, made him look like a skinny magician growing out of a myth as he drew the frowning girl-child self-importantly arranged in her late grandmother’s wing chair. I made much of the shadows and the history of that shabby room in “Impediments,” the title story in a collection of stories about failed loves. In the story, the young man is awed to be in the house and he is trying to impress the young woman sitting beside him by drawing her grumpy little cousin. He is deeply attracted to the young woman, she is different from the usual pretty girl, she has a natural, unspoiled warmth and an endearing determination to make you feel appreciated. But the young woman goes away at the end of the summer and the soldier is left with his unrequited love. Yet this evening of lamplight and shadows in the arrogant, crumbling old house on top of a mountain will serve him all his life as a source of his art. It, more than any other source, is responsible for the elegiac, “lost,” overlay that haunts his canvases and wins him fame and fortune. Years later, he sees a frowning woman sitting in a wing chair across a crowded room. She is balancing a glass of champagne rather primly on her lap and staring into a space that seems far from this room. The vision instantly fires up in him the old, trusted elegiac spark and he goes over to her and says, “I’d like to sketch you, just as you are, in that chair.” And she comes back from whatever faraway place she has been in and looks at him closely and says, “But you already have.” He thinks she is speaking symbolically or trying to charm him by being mysterious. But she lets him sketch her, just as she is, balancing her glass of champagne primly on her knees. Soon a crowd has gathered around the wing chair: who can resist the spectacle of a famous artist on one knee in front of a chair, sketching an unknown woman? He says, “You are a very good model. You keep still, but you don’t hide the flow of your thoughts.” She responds with a distant half smile. He signs the drawing and offers it to her, but she says, “No, keep it to remember me by,” and stands up, puts down her undrunk champagne, and walks out of the party. The reader knows that she has loved him since she was ten and has measured all men since then by his memory. But she has also, over the span of years, grown into her father’s cynicism and is hardened enough not to try for a belated romantic ending.