Flora A Novel

XV.


I was helping to strip Nonie’s bed. It was the day of the week I felt sanest. Mrs. Jones had known the Recoverers and Doctor Cam and my father when he was sixteen and the elusive Lisbeth. She knew what I had lost in Nonie. Her Tuesday appearances attached me to my old world.

Each week she took away bundles and the following week she brought back separate flat packages labeled by room. Each piece was marked in India ink so the laundry would know which room it belonged to when they made up the packages. Nonie’s linens were marked MASTER; Flora’s were marked FANNING. My father’s were marked HIGHSMITH.

“I reckon I’ll be going to those fireworks tomorrow night they’re having down at the lake,” said Mrs. Jones.

“But you hate fireworks.”

“Not hate. It’s just them going off unexpectedly makes me jump. But this time I’m going for that little girl who died from polio. It was Rosemary’s idea.”

I waited the way Mrs. Jones had shown me how to wait when we were beginning this kind of conversation.

“Rosemary always was one for remembrances. She loved little ceremonies. For people who had passed or for a neighbor’s pet. I woke straight out of sleep and she was saying clear as anything, ‘Mamma, go down to the lake on the Fourth and every time a pretty firework goes up in the night sky say “Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten.”’ That was the little girl’s name. It was in the paper. She was from Georgia. Her aunt was driving her to camp. It was so hot, the aunt said, and they saw this lake and decided to stop there for a swim.”

“You’ll go all by yourself at night?”

“I usually am all by myself.”

“I wish I could go with you.”

“That would be nice. But you have to mind your father. He has his reasons.”

“I can’t wait till school starts, even if all my friends are gone.”

“You’ll make new friends. How are you liking that library book I brought?”

“Oh, it was fine.”

“You already finished it?”

“There’s not a lot to do up here.”

I was prepared for some discussion of the book about the traveling doll to back up my lie, but Mrs. Jones simply nodded and said she’d take it back and bring me another one next Tuesday. “Maybe this time she’ll have one of those in that series you like.”

“We had someone to dinner on Sunday,” I told her.

“That was a change for you.”

“It was only that Finn who delivers our groceries. But Flora thought we should ask him.”

“Was it nice?”

“Yes, but I ate too much. Nonie never made such huge meals. After dinner, he drew a picture of our living room to send to his mother. And he drew this portrait of me.” I got it out of the top drawer of Nonie’s dressing table to show.

“Why, it’s good enough to frame.”

“Do you think it looks like me?”

“Well, it makes you look older, but they’re your features and you look that way when you’re … pondering something. Why weren’t you wearing your nice dress?”

“Oh, it seemed too formal,” I said. For an extra reason I almost added that he was only the person who delivered the groceries, but I stopped myself in time. What if Mrs. Jones were to think I wouldn’t have dressed up for her, either, as she was only the person who cleaned the house? I was going to have to be more careful of people’s feelings. I had lost enough friends.

The outgrown dress was back on its hanger in the closet, a little rumpled from its punishment on the floor, but looking like any dress waiting to be put on again.


AS JULY BEGAN to crawl forward, I fantasized that my father would show up for my birthday in early August, even though it would fall on a Tuesday this year. He wouldn’t announce it in his postcards, the latest being of a black bear and her cub standing in a meadow (“Greetings from the Great Smoky Mts. Nat’l. Park”) with its less than satisfying message: “Thought you and Flora would like these two, whose ancestors were among our state’s first settlers. Lots of construction going on here. Will phone soon.” He wouldn’t hint at it in a phone call, either. His car would just drive up sometime around the middle of the seventh, raising a cloud of dust and … what would he do then? I couldn’t recall very well what he had done in former years, because Nonie always did so much. She treated the day like a national holiday. Last year, for my tenth birthday, a huge gift-wrapped box waited on the dining table all through the day while Nonie and I went to lunch at the Downtown Cafeteria and then to a wonderful Gene Tierney movie in which she fools people into thinking she’s been murdered. Afterward Nonie drove us out to the Recreation Park, where we both rode the merry-go-round and had ice cream sundaes. When we returned to the house I opened her presents, but we left the big package on the table for when my father got home because it was supposed to be from him, though I knew she had probably chosen it and wrapped it herself.

It was dusk when my father finally came in and made himself a tall Jack Daniel’s. When I opened the package and thanked him he raised his eyebrows at the white Samsonite suitcase with my initials, H.D.A., in gold and said, “Ah, now you’re one of us.”

At first I thought he meant because my initials were the same as theirs, Honora Drake Anstruther’s and Harry Drake Anstruther’s.

But then he added, “Now you can run away.”

“Why would I want to run away?”

“Oh,” he said, smiling into his glass, “it seems to run in the family. Doesn’t it, Mother?”

It was later that evening, after supper, when he had refreshed his drink and stumbled up to bed, that Nonie told me the fullest version yet of Harry’s running away at sixteen with Willow Fanning.

(“It was a sad thing, darling. She tricked him because she wanted a man to travel with her. By then Harry had his full growth and looked more like twenty than sixteen. And then, when they got to where she wanted to go, she dumped him. He caught polio coming home on the bus. At least she had paid his fare.”

“Where did she want to go?”

“To meet up with another man.”

“But how did she trick my father?”

“By making him think she adored him. Young men are pushovers for coquettes. And an invalid coquette is hard to resist. I often worried she’d ruined all women for Harry. But then your mother came along, the very opposite of a coquette.”)


FLORA GOT ALL the mail. Packages from the school where she would teach fifth grade. Today she had a letter from a teacher at her school who said he would be glad to teach her how to drive so she wouldn’t need to be dependent on the bus.

“That’s very kind of him, now all I need is a car,” remarked Flora, but so good-naturedly it could not qualify as sarcasm. “He was right nice, he was on the committee that hired me. Who knows, Helen? Maybe I’ll follow in your mother’s footsteps.”

I knew where this was going and did not respond.

No week went by without a letter of several pages (on both sides) from the faithful Juliet Parker. (“She says the blight got the first tomatoes but luckily there was still time to replant … Oh! Uncle Sam and Aunt Garnet are going to wait until I’m back for their remarriage ceremony, isn’t that sweet?”)

And then one day Flora looked up beaming from Juliet’s latest letter and announced, as if a prize were being bestowed on both of us, that “they” would so much like it if Flora could send them a recent picture of “Lisbeth’s girl.”

“There aren’t any,” I said.

“But surely—didn’t you and Rachel Huff snap pictures of each other? No? Well, I’m sure we can find something recent. How about a school picture?”

“No,” I said.

“No school picture?”

“Just no. Not that I can send down there. I don’t want my picture passed around by people I don’t even know.”

Flora’s face went through some drastic changes before she turned her back on me. I thought she might be cranking up for a crying spree, but then, still turned away, her voice, cold and dry, said, “You sound exactly like her.”

“Like who?”

“Like Lisbeth when she was being cruel.”

“Cruel how?”

Flora heaved a great sigh and made as if to throw herself forward into some kitchen project for next meal.

“Cruel how?”

“That’s enough said. It’s more than enough.”

“You can’t just stop there.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“You’ve got to tell me or you’ll be cruel.”

Flora turned around and treated me to what was for her a scathing once-over. “One time—it was your comment about your snapshot that reminded me of it—she went into the family album and cut herself out of the picture of all of us Daddy had taken with his new camera. Just scissored it out with manicure scissors and put the picture back in the album. It wasn’t discovered till much later and Daddy asked her why she had done it.”

“What did she say?” I could not imagine myself doing such an extreme thing, though I was thrilled by it.

“She said it was because she looked particularly nice in that shot and she wanted to have just a picture of herself without the rest of us around.”

“That’s not exactly cruel.”

“Oh, there were other— No, I’ve said enough. I’ve said too much. It’s just that you were so like her when you said, ‘Not that I can send down there.’ Like it was beneath you. And yet you were hardly three when she died. She wouldn’t have had enough time to turn you against us.”

“Why should she want to turn me against people I didn’t even know?”

“Because we weren’t the kind of people she could be proud of. Sometimes at night when I would wake up and throw my leg over her to make sure she was still there, she would get mad and say mean things. Oh, this has gone beyond far enough, Helen. Now go away and put it out of your mind.” Again she turned toward some kitchen duty that could save her.

“You might as well tell me what she said, because I’m not going away. You’re stuck with me until the end of the summer.”

“I didn’t mean for you to go away, Helen, I only meant—”

“She would get mad and say what mean things?”

“Oh, that my mother was trash and Daddy got left holding a package that wasn’t his, and how her father had been the only brother smart enough to leave the state and better himself, but then along came the influenza and dumped her right back to start all over with the people her father had struggled to get away from. When she was a little girl, she said, she used to lie awake in Florida and hear her father and mother make fun of them back in Alabama, imitating their accents. Her father had worked hard to get rid of his. Both he and her mother had acting ambitions. Now, aren’t you sorry you made me tell you such things?”

“Not really.” I was elated rather than sorry. Flora had given me two vivid snapshots of the woman I couldn’t remember.


AFTER FLORA’S EXPLOSION, or the nearest she had ever come to one, I felt things between us had seriously shifted. If I was going to get through the rest of the summer successfully (rather than abjectly), I was going to need new tactics.

In the daytime, walking around the house and its dilapidated grounds, or lurking on the Recoverers’ porch on my father’s side pretending to read a book while I waited for opportunities to steal across the hall and plunder Flora’s drawer for the next letter, I forced myself toward a subtler kind of thinking. Sometimes I was sure I could actually feel my brain stretching to make room for more intricate and convoluted paths. Not just stopping at the first old I-am-furious-so-I’ll-lash-out point, but letting it branch and divide into other possibilities. I could lash out and make her cry and get some instant satisfaction, or I could hold back and see what benefits came from my holding back.

After Flora’s outburst I went away and checked myself over for wounds and then added up the pluses and minuses. What was lost was that I now knew Flora didn’t adore my mother as much I had thought, but so what? How important was it that someone like Flora should adore my mother? What had been found were some valuable pointers to what Lisbeth really was like, and out of that finding branched another: that I saw myself not only capable but willing to behave as my mother had behaved under the circumstances. No, Lisbeth herself had not lived long enough to “turn me against them,” but poor Flora in her anguished disclosures had certainly made some headway. To the deplorable list of a father shot between the eyes during a poker game and a live-in Negro maid who owned half the house were now added a trashy mother and a father left holding a package that wasn’t his.

However, I was stuck with Flora for the rest of July and most of August. “You’re stuck with me!” I had shouted at her and rendered her instantly on the defensive. Being stuck with Flora, how could I make the most of my stuckness?

For a start, there were still those unread letters from Nonie in Flora’s drawer. I needed to find more reasons to be upstairs during the times while Flora was safely occupied downstairs. And what else could be wrested from this jail sentence with Flora? Well, I could squeeze more out of her about my mother. This would require a more subversive approach because, guilt-ridden over her loss of control, Flora was on guard against it happening again.

I worked on these things during my pitiful daytime rounds of our house and in bed at night, burrowing into Nonie’s sheets and hoping for further instructions from her. Her high-shouldered black purse (faithfully gone over with a cloth every Tuesday by Mrs. Jones) watched over me from its same spot atop the dresser. Her Easter hat lay in its tissues storing up its powers for those extreme situations when I would be driven to put it on again and angle myself just right in the mirror so I could evoke the back of her head.

When I needed to, I spoke aloud, in a husky undertone that couldn’t reach the type of person who might shamelessly crouch outside doors—and Flora, to give her credit, was not that type. The things I said, or asked, came out in a kind of automaton’s chant, as if I were being cranked up from inside and “played”:

Round and round but what else is there?

And then I would stop and wait (in midstep if I was walking around the house in daytime, in midbreath between the laundered sheets marked MASTER in Nonie’s bed at night) in case there was an answer.

I had lost all desire to walk down to my grandfather’s shortcut and explore the crater by myself. That whole experience had been ruined by the subsequent nightmare of a dismembered Nonie lying at the bottom and the old-lady shoes.

Round and round the house, “remembering” it when it had flower beds and a view painted by a recovering inebriate who bolted at the first whiff of adversity (“We could have named it the Starling Peake room, but how can you name a room after someone who ran off without paying?”); when it still had a grassy bank I rolled down over and over again while a woman turned her head elsewhere in restlessness or disappointment: the culmination of my outdoor rounds being the pilgrimage to the garage to sit in Nonie’s Oldsmobile and lay my cheek on the steering wheel and wish her voice back.

Occasionally it came, though not like the first time, when she told me to cut down the weeds, and not like the day I was walking down Sunset Drive feeling strange and she told me to sit down in the shade and let everything go. If it came through now, it wasn’t immediate and visceral like those first two times. It was becoming more like my memory of her voice—or worse, my ventriloquism of it. Unlike Mrs. Jones, I couldn’t accept with unconditional certainty that my dead one was speaking to me.





XVI.


“How many did you have in fifth grade, Helen?”

“How many what did I have in fifth grade?”

“Oh, sorry. How many children were in your fifth-grade class?”

I had to stop and count. “Twenty.”

“That many,” she said.

“Why?”

“They say I’ll have ten. Maybe twelve. It’s a rural school. I just wish I knew what they were going to be like so I could prepare better!”

“There’ll be some smart ones and some dumb ones.”

“You were one of the smart ones. Mrs. Anstruther used to write that your report cards were pure joy.”

“And there’ll be some you like and others you wish you could hit.”

“Oh, I would never do that.”

“I said ‘wish.’”

“I just hope they’ll respect me. And like me, too, of course.”

“Well, they will if you …”

“If I what? Really, Helen, I’d be grateful for your advice. What about your teacher?”

“Which one?”

“The teacher you had this past year for fifth grade.”

“We had different teachers for different subjects.”

“Oh, I’m going to be teaching mine all their subjects. Which teachers were your favorites?”

“That depends on whether you mean like or respect.” I knew I was edging into my smarty-pants mode, but it worked so well on Flora it was hard to forfeit the advantage. “I didn’t always like the ones I respected and I didn’t necessarily respect the ones I liked.”

“That’s very well put, honey. Respect is probably the most important, though, isn’t it? I mean, if you had to choose between being liked and being respected.”

“Maybe you won’t have to choose between them,” I magnanimously predicted.

“Why did you respect the ones you respected?”

I had to stop and think. “They made you feel they knew things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“The things they were supposed to be teaching you, of course—” But she kept goggling at me for the next wisdom I was about to impart, so I added, off the cuff, “And things about life in general.”

“I sometimes feel I know nothing about life in general,” Flora said despondently. “You know what I am afraid of, Helen? I’m afraid those kids will see right into me and despise me.”

“Well, if there is nothing in there for them to see, they won’t have anything to despise.” My father would have smirked at this cleverness, but, alas, Flora was on the verge of tears and I knew it was time to jettison the smarty mode and do something to shore up her confidence.

“You know what we should do?” I said. “We should play fifth grade. You’ll be yourself as the teacher and stand behind the desk and I’ll be your fifth-grade class.”

“But how can you be a whole class?”

“You wait and see.”

“What desk should we use? Your grandmother’s? But we’d have to turn it around so I could stand behind it. And then those pigeonholes would block my view of the class.”

“We’ll use my father’s room upstairs. He has the perfect flat desk and the room’s practically bare, so it will be easy to imagine what we need.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Helen, he might not like that.”

“He’s not even here, and we can’t mess it up because we’re not going to bring anything in.”

“I might want to have a few of my books on the desk,” said Flora, already into the spirit of things. As my guardian she seemed pleased and grateful that the two of us were getting along again, yet she was also like my contemporary who couldn’t wait to play this interesting new game. For Brian I had made up our Auditions game, and Annie and I together had created our Bad Habits game, which we never tired of, in which we took turns imitating unfortunate habits of people at school—no one, from the janitor to the principal, was exempt—and having the other guess who was being mocked.

Flora would have begun right away, but I suggested we should start next morning so it would be like the first day of real school. I told her to wear a dress and put on her high heels to practice entering the classroom. I was eager to begin, too, but I needed some time to prepare. Not only did I have to be all those children, but also I was going to have to make up the action and direct it as we went along.

“How should we begin?” asked Flora next morning. After breakfast, she had dashed upstairs to put on her nice suit and her heels. “I left off my nylons, because I have to save them. I hope that’s all right.”

I was already seated on the bare floor in my father’s room, about ten feet out from the desk. “You’ll come in,” I said. “No, not yet! You have to get in the proper mood. You’re making your first entrance. This will be their first impression of you. Just remember there’s ten of me here, in all shapes and—”

“They said there might be twelve.”

“Well, for our purposes we’re going to have ten.”

Flora went out in the hall, and when I gave the signal she came in. Her walk was all right, but her face was bunched with nervousness. I decided to go easy, however, until she got into the part.

“Good morning,” she said brightly after scurrying behind my father’s desk. “My name is Miss Waring. I’ll write it up here on the board.” She turned away, and while she was writing in the air above her, I felt a strange pang. Miss Waring had also been my mother’s name, the name she must have written on her classroom’s board the first day she came to teach at my father’s school.

Flora whipped around and gave me a shy look of triumph (see how well I imagined the board!). “Now I’m going to go around the room and have each of you say your name …”

Flora’s torturous word arrangements could drive you crazy, but if I stopped her to say she sounded like she meant to walk around the classroom I might put a crimp in the confidence she was beginning to build.

But I couldn’t let it pass when she pointed at me and said, “Will you say your name for me, honey?”

“No, no, not ‘honey.’ Just point to the person and nod in a cool, friendly way.”

“Oh, okay.”

“And they’re only going to have first names. It’s too complicated to think up family names, too.”

“Good idea.” Assuming a passable cool, friendly demeanor, she pointed and nodded.

“My name is Angela,” I piped up in a saccharine voice, sitting up straight and clasping my hands over my tummy like a goody-goody. A class always needed one of those.

“Angela,” she repeated, with a little too much gratitude, but I let it go. She pointed and nodded again to the next child.

I hunched over, emitting a dangerous growl.

“I didn’t quite get that,” she said.

I growled again, more angrily.

“I’m sorry, but I—”

“Don’t apologize! He hates school and he wants to hate you. You’ve got to be firm and show your authority.”

“You will have to speak up, young man,” Flora said firmly.

“Jock!” I bellowed.

“Jock,” she repeated calmly, not rising to the bait. “And you there, next?”

I undulated my shoulders suggestively. “I am Lulabelle.”

Flora tittered.

“What’s funny? You’re not supposed to laugh at people’s names.”

“I’m sorry, Helen, it’s just that you’re so good at this—”

“You have to stay in character, Miss Waring, and for Pete’s sake stop saying you’re sorry.”

“Oh, I’m sorry—”

Then we both started giggling. Flora became my age for a minute. It made me wonder, almost sadly, whether she had played enough as a child.

After the coquettish Lulabelle came dumb and timid “Milderd,” who couldn’t pronounce her own name.

“Is that Mildred?” suggested Miss Waring tactfully.

“Yes, ma’am. Milderd.”

“All right. And—” She nodded at the next student.

“Brick,” I said in a strong, masculine voice, already seeing his potential as a leader.

“Can someone be named Brick?” asked Flora, derailing the whole thing.

“Parents sometimes give their children family names for first names. His mother’s maiden name was Brickstone,” I improvised, “which is on his birth certificate, but everyone calls him Brick.”

Next was Suzanne, alert and confident, with an assertive ponytail, the kind of girl you hoped would pick you as her friend. Then came Timmy, who had a chronic snivel and cough and would maybe die during the school year. After that was Ebenezer, a sly young mongrel who took things that weren’t his, like Nonie’s stepbrother, Earl Quarles. Then there was Jason, who would be either a positive or a negative influence on the class, I hadn’t decided yet. And last of all was a definitely negative girl named after that homely doll in the book I couldn’t read. Hitty’s ill-natured smile would spook the teacher until Miss Waring started wishing she could slap her.


“YOU ARE SO good at this,” Flora would say, shaking her head in awe. Not during our class practices anymore, because during those I had pretty successfully weaned her from lapsing out of character. “I feel I know these children. I want to keep them interested. I love what we did with Alabama history, having them be the Indians and then the Spanish and French and so on. I lie awake at night and think about them, I think up ways to help them improve. For instance, what if I asked little Mildred to practice using the word ‘dread’ in different sentences? ‘I dread the dentist,’ and so on. She might find she could pronounce her own name after all.”

“Better not use that example, though. If she doesn’t dread the dentist, it might make her start.”

“Oh dear, you’re right. You know, maybe it’s just as well, Helen, that I won’t have someone like you in my real fifth-grade class.”

“Why is that?” I asked, though I could tell she was going to say something flattering.

“You’re just so quick and imaginative I couldn’t keep up with you, that’s why.”

“But how do you know there won’t be someone—I mean, it’s possible that you’ll have someone like Brick or Suzanne,” I deflected modestly.

“No,” said Flora. “You made up Brick and Suzanne, whereas this is a rural school and … oh, I don’t know. Your mother used to say Alabama’s education standards were woefully behind. That’s why she practically starved herself so she could finish college at Chapel Hill and get a North Carolina teaching certificate.”

“How do you know she starved herself?” This was the first I’d heard of it.

“Because we all had to help her out. I mean, not me, I was still a child, though I contributed little candies for the food packages. But everyone sent money orders, even Juliet. And, even then, Lisbeth had to go to bed early so she could do without the dinner meal.”

“How did you know this?”

“Well, Lisbeth still wrote to us fairly often in those days, and she would describe what it was like to go to bed on an empty stomach. She said she would curl up in a ball so she felt fuller in the middle and then pull the blanket over her head to keep out the sounds of other students heading off to dinner. It made Daddy cry to think of her suffering like that for an education. Juliet said that was when he started going out and playing cards for bigger stakes.”

I, too, lie awake at night now, when I am older than Nonie ever became, and think about those children, the only fifth-grade class Flora ever got to teach. Brick and Suzanne and Lulabelle and Ebenezer and Jock and Jason and Hitty and Timmy and Angela and little “Milderd.” I round them up in whatever order they present themselves on that particular night and meditate on whatever pattern they want to form. It might be winners and losers. It might be who improved the most, or who disappointed the most, or who got together with whom years later and revealed something heartwarming or shocking. The combinations seem endless. Or maybe I should simply say I have not reached the end of them yet because I always fall asleep before the possibilities are exhausted.

It has puzzled me how those ten imaginary students could have played such a comfortable, even comforting, role in my night life for so many years. Their continued existence has always stayed innocently parallel to the remorse that I am still growing into. Sometimes I think those classroom hours with Flora stay safe and separate from the rest of that summer because they were filled with hope and promise and mutual development and even closeness. We were making up a game that needed both of us. (Does anyone, of any age, make up such games anymore?) But right here, right in here somewhere, in what we were making together, is located the redemption, if there is to be any.





[undated]

Dear Flora,

Here is a quick reply before today turns into one of “those” days. Harry is under the weather and taking a day off and I’m going to pick up Helen from school and take her to the movies so my son can have a quiet house.

I was so relieved that you had nothing to worry about, after all. I found myself almost wishing you had kept the worry to yourself. I knew a girl—this was of course many years ago—who did discover she had something to worry about. It was not her fault, she was forced, but, as I say, this was ages ago, another lifetime, really, and I was to lose touch with her. I have often wondered how things turned out. I think I remember hearing through the grapevine that she married someone older and I like to hope things worked themselves out.

Since you asked my advice, even though your little crisis has passed, I will say to you what I’ve said before. Keep yourself to yourself until you’ve got a ring on your finger and even then don’t tell everything. Especially not then.

I would just add it’s a smart habit to destroy correspondence. Old letters can fall into the wrong hands. I have to admit that I shuddered when you mentioned rereading my letters. I do wish you would deposit their main message—that I care about you and want you to be your best—in your heart and then destroy the letters.

Take care, now.

Yours truly,





Honora Anstruther





XVII.


Though our Fifth Grade game brought Flora and me closer and gave us something to plan for each day besides the next meal, it also gave me shamelessly easy access to Nonie’s letters across the hall in Flora’s drawer. After we’d finished, Flora, flushed with her successes—of which she had more and more, because she obeyed directions well—would gather up her books and say now she’d better get down to the kitchen and earn her board and keep. She would ask me what I would like for dinner and cheerfully offer tasty suggestions when I said I didn’t care.

After our classroom hour in my father’s room, I would fling myself flat on the floor, my arms and legs outspread like a prisoner on a rack, and dramatically declare myself worn out. And Flora would say, “Well of course you are. That imagination of yours must just guzzle energy.” At last she had stopped asking what I was going to do with the rest of my day. This was partly due to my ungracious replies during the first weeks, but the tide really had turned when I was able to say, lying on my back on the bare floor, “I’ll stay here awhile and plan tomorrow’s class while everything’s fresh in my mind, and then I’ll go out on my father’s porch and read.” The perfect child who knew how to keep herself quietly occupied. And Flora would cross the hall and change out of her teacher dress and high heels and scuttle downstairs on her funny bare feet with the upturned nails, humming one of her tunes.

On a subsequent raid of the drawer I’d had a setback. The letters were no longer in their neat packet with the earliest conveniently at the bottom. The ribbon had been untied and cast aside and they were scattered all over, some detached from their envelopes. It was as if another unauthorized person, more careless or more desperate than me, had been plundering the drawer. I realized that of course it had to be Flora rummaging around for some remembered advice to help her get through something.

The new disarray allowed me to snatch up a letter at random and retreat to safety without having to spend time making the packet look untouched. But it destroyed my plan of reading the letters as they had been written. I had been hoping to construct a chronicle of how Nonie had been lured into the correspondence and what she might have revealed to Flora that she hadn’t had a chance to reveal to me before she died.

Forced to read the letters (some undated, often the ones missing envelopes) in this haphazard fashion, during which Nonie gamely responded to Flora’s various crises, I wasn’t sure whether Flora was sixteen or eighteen or twenty when she was having them. I wasn’t even sure what some of them were: Nonie could be maddeningly oblique. I needed Flora’s side of the correspondence because she was sure to have spilled all, but hadn’t I watched those letters disappear into Nonie’s pocket, doomed to the place of no rereadings? And she had surely taken her own advice and destroyed them as soon as possible.

I also felt let down by the, so far, few mentions of me in the letters. I had yet to read about the little girl whose report cards were such a joy and who was the chief reason for Nonie to go on living. “I’m going to pick up Helen from school and take her to the movies so my son can have a quiet house” was not a description of the person I thought I was.


“OH DEAR, I hope Finn is all right,” Flora said after ordering our groceries.

“Why shouldn’t he be?” I asked, though I had been wondering about him myself but didn’t want to be the one to bring it up.

“It was this impatient man on the phone. He kept cutting me off before I finished my sentences.”

“That was Mr. Crump. He owns Grove Market. I wouldn’t take it personally. He’s just in a bad mood generally.”

(“Poor Archie Crump,” Nonie had said, when we were driving home from the market. I had been complaining that Mr. Crump looked straight through me as though I wasn’t there. “He does that with all children,” said Nonie, “I wouldn’t take it personally. Things didn’t work out for him as he expected.” “What things?” “Well, Archie started off as a stock boy at Grove’s—he was in high school with Harry. Then he married Mr. Grove’s daughter, but after Mr. Grove died and Archie inherited the store, Serena Crump went off to live by herself at the beach.” “Why?” “Well,” said Nonie, pausing to assemble an answer, “maybe she came to realize she hated groceries.” This sent me into hysterical laughter. Nonie continued to face front, behind the steering wheel, her nose uplifted—so high in the air a bird could poop in it, Annie would say—but she allowed herself a wry smile. “It’s not you particularly he ignores,” she added. “He just doesn’t notice children in general.” “Maybe we make him sad because he never had any,” I suggested. “That’s a sweet thought, darling,” she said, reaching over to pat my hand.)

“I just hope Finn’s not unwell,” Flora went on.

“He was probably already out delivering groceries,” I said. But now she had me worried. Could his lung or his mental state have collapsed again? Could he have displeased Mr. Crump and gotten fired? I was surprised at the alarm such prospects raised in me. Ever since his evening with us, I had been plotting how, as soon as Flora left, my father and I would ask Finn to come and live with us. “You can be our honorary Recoverer,” I imagined myself saying to him. I had Starling Peake’s room picked out for him, with the nicest of the oriental rugs my father had discarded, and we could put in a desk where he could draw views from the window, after he had topped the trees, which he had already offered to do. He would drive me to and from school in Nonie’s car and we would run errands as Nonie and I had done and my father would pay him “something,” as he was paying Flora “something.” Finn’s joining us would improve life for all three of us. In the evenings, the two men would have their drinks together and I would serve them Flora’s cheese straws, which I was going to have her teach me to make. And by the time Finn came to live with us, I would also have learned to cook a few meals whose aromas could make a man swoon.

But it was Mr. Crump in the Grove Market van who arrived with our order in the late afternoon. Flora got off to a bad start with him by flying out barefooted and asking where Finn was.

“Day off,” said Crump with a scowl. “That driveway of yours is a liability.”

“We’re getting it fixed as soon as the war is over,” I piped up, but he neither heard nor saw me.

“Here, let me help you with those boxes,” said Flora.

“Better go back,” he warned, looking her up and down. “You’ll cut up your feet.”

“Oh, they’re tough as old nails,” Flora said with a laugh, wresting a box away from him. But then, going triumphantly up the porch stairs ahead of him, she stubbed her toe and yelped, almost dropping the box.

“What’d I tell you,” said Crump, with the nearest thing to a smile I had ever caught on his sour face. He held the door for her and set down his box of groceries next to hers on the kitchen counter. Then he took a deep breath and let out an animal-like groan.

“Are you all right, Mr. Crump?”

“Yes, ma’am. It was just—”

“Oh, please call me Flora. I’m Helen’s cousin. Her mother and I grew up together in Alabama. Why don’t you sit down a minute, Mr. Crump, if you can spare the time. I’ve got some corn bread ready to come out and it’s never better than when you have it hot with a glass of cold milk. That’s what I’m going to do, and it would be nice to have some company. Helen, how about you?”

“No, thank you. I’m going out.”

I fled to the garage, to sit in Nonie’s car and fume, but not before I’d heard Flora begin to confide how hard the summer had been for “poor Helen being cooped up with nobody but me, what with this polio scare and her little friend and she misses her grandmother …” Old spill-all Flora, even to such an audience as Mr. Crump. Had she really thought I was going to sit down at the table with that rude old man and let him ignore me some more?

I was disgusted by the whole scene between them. Why did she show no discrimination about people? If it had been Finn (why had he taken a day off during the workweek?) I could see her inviting him to sit down for corn bread and company. But didn’t she see how Mr. Crump had looked almost happy when she stubbed her toe? Even his own wife couldn’t stand him and had to go off and live at the beach.

I sat in the car, rocking the steering wheel to the left and to the right. I turned an imaginary key in the ignition and heard the engine roar into life. “Now, back out slowly,” Finn instructed from the passenger’s seat. “There is no rush. No rush, a-tall, a-tall. I saw the way you made up your mind to jump, that day in the woods. You can do anything you set your mind to.”

At last Flora and Crump emerged from the house. I could see them without turning my head. They were talking and looking toward the car. If they walked over, I would look right through Mr. Crump. If Flora addressed me, I would have to answer, but I would do it in a way to make Mr. Crump feel he wasn’t there. I prepared it so well I was disappointed when I heard the grocery van start up and watched it bump down the drive. Flora went back into the house. I would do the next best thing, I decided. I wouldn’t say his name to Flora no matter what. It would be like she’d been having the corn bread all by herself and there was nothing to talk about.

But Flora, in full dinner-making mode now, was eager to talk. “It seems Finn had some important meeting today with a medical board out at the military hospital.”

I kept silence, not rising to my usual “How did you know that?”

“It seems,” Flora went on, “the Army is reviewing his case. He may get an honorable discharge instead of a medical discharge, and then he’d be entitled to all the normal GI benefits.”

“But he said he was already discharged.”

“Yes, but evidently his father, who knows some senator, got involved and now they have to reconsider.”

So far she had substituted “it seems” and “evidently” for a certain person’s name. Was she tacitly obeying my embargo? Had all those hours playing fifth-grade class together sharpened her sense of me?

But over dinner (we were having macaroni and cheese, along with the milk a certain person had delivered and drank some of) she allowed herself some hes and hims.

“I’m so glad I asked him to sit down a minute. When he groaned like that I thought he was ill, but you know what it was?”

I narrowed my eyes at a heaped forkful of macaroni and cheese.

“It was the corn bread,” said Flora. “He smelled the corn bread and it reminded him of his mother. He told me that after we had talked awhile. Isn’t that touching?”

I filled my mouth with the heaped forkful and looked out the window.

“Oh, and he asked if your father was interested in selling the Oldsmobile. He wants it for his wife.”

“His wife! She doesn’t even live here!”

“No, but he said she had always admired Mrs. Anstruther’s touring car. He was thinking he might drive it down to her at the beach and come back on the bus. If she had such a car, Serena—isn’t that a nice name?—might be tempted to come home more. I gather there have been some differences between them, but, you know, Helen, differences sometimes get ironed out over time. Look at your uncle Sam and aunt Garnet in Alabama, getting remarried after being separated for twenty-six years. Wouldn’t it be sweet if Mrs. Anstruther’s car were to be the means of their reconciliation?”

“My father isn’t going to sell my grandmother’s car so the Crumps can get reconciled.”

“Of course not, honey. I only meant … And besides, it’s up to your father. I told him that.”





XVIII.


When did remorse fall into disfavor? It was sometime during the second half of my life. As a child, I knelt next to Nonie in church and said alongside her sedate contralto: the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable. Then, for a long time I didn’t go to church, and when I next said the General Confession it had been watered down to we are truly sorry and we humbly repent. If someone had really done you an ill turn and later came to you and said, “I am truly sorry,” would that mean as much to you as “the burden of it has been intolerable to me”?

Remorse is wired straight to the heart. “Stop up the access and passage to remorse,” Lady Macbeth bids the dark spirits, “that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose.”

Remorse went out of fashion around the same time that “Stop feeling guilty,” and “You’re too hard on yourself,” and “You need to love yourself more” came into fashion.

“The summer I turned eleven,” I might begin, and often have begun, “I was left in the care of my late mother’s first cousin. She was twenty-two. It was for the most part a boring, exasperating summer. Such an isolated summer would not be possible today. We had the radio and the mail and the telephone (though few people wrote or called) and the woman who came to clean on Tuesdays and the man who delivered our groceries. Most days my feelings fell somewhere on the scale between bored / protected and bored / superior. But there were also times when I felt I had to fight to keep from losing the little I had been left with, including my sense of myself. Maybe I fought too hard. Anyway, the summer ended terribly (grievously?) and I have wondered ever since how much of it I caused.”

After I have furnished some specifics, I am always told, in one way or another, that I am being too hard on myself. “You were a child, not even an adolescent yet. You had lost your model and your bulwark and were clinging to your foundations, such as you had been taught to perceive them, and you were ready to fight anyone who threatened them.”

Or: “At eleven, your cerebral cortex was still growing and your cognitive powers hadn’t finished developing. You were still floating in a continuum of possibilities and discovering what was in your power to do. But you weren’t yet adept at foreseeing the consequences of what was in your power to do.”

Or: “Then was then. Now is now. Put all that behind you, accept the person you have become through your particular gifts and failures. It is all flow, anyway. Disruption and regeneration. Forgive that child and go forth and sin no more. At least, try to do no harm in the years remaining to you.”

Remorse derives from the Latin remordere: to vex, disturb, bite, sting again (the “again” is important). It began as a transitive verb, as in “my sinful lyfe dost me remord.”

But now I say alongside Thomas à Kempis: “I would far rather feel remorse than know how to define it.”


MRS. JONES LIMPED in on Tuesday with her right ankle taped to twice its size. She had turned it while out walking, she said. Flora made a huge fuss over her and begged her to sit down and let her make her a nice breakfast. “And then I can help with the cleaning, Mrs. Jones. Under your supervision, of course.”

“Thank you, I’ve had my breakfast, and it don’t hurt nearly as bad as it looks. It’s only twisted, not sprained. I’ll be able to do my work just fine.”

“Well, I can certainly do my room and change my linens.”

“That’s thoughtful of you, but I would get all turned around if I didn’t stick to my usual system. I’ve got to the place where my routine more or less runs me.”

“At least let me make you a cup of tea,” implored Flora.

“Oh, I’ve got my thermos of tea.”

“Well, just please call me if you need anything,” said Flora. “Will you at least promise me that?”

Mrs. Jones said she would. She had finally stopped calling her ma’am after Flora’s repeated injunctions to call her Flora and now respectfully abstained from calling her anything at all.

Flora said she would work on her lesson plans upstairs until Mrs. Jones came up at noon to do the top floor. Naturally we couldn’t play fifth-grade class when she was in the house.

I went outside to bide my time in the garage while Mrs. Jones scrubbed the kitchen floor and went over her life. I knew almost to the minute when it would be time to join up with her in Nonie’s old room to change my sheets. The car had become my designated place for thinking about Finn and planning the details of his moving in with us. Also, I felt the car was more in need of my company and protection since the grocer had expressed his horrible intention to Flora.

Mrs. Jones told me she had turned her foot in the dark walking back from the lake after the Fourth of July fireworks. “It didn’t start hurting till I got home. It throbbed and swole up something awful but I kept my feet elevated as much as I could.”

“You didn’t go to the doctor?”

“No, I could tell it wasn’t broken or sprained.”

“How could you tell?”

“You can tell a right smart lot about your body when you get to my age.”

“Did you do that remembrance thing for the little girl?”

“I did. Every time a pretty firework went up over the lake I did.”

“But there must have been lots of pretty fireworks.”

“I waited for the ones Rosemary would have thought pretty. The ones in color, or the whirly ones.”

“And did you say the thing aloud?”

“I did, even though some folks looked at me funny. Every time I said it, ‘Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten,’ I thought of that little girl, on her way to camp, but her and the aunt stopping for that swim. When I was walking back to the car after the fireworks, I stumbled in the dark and turned my ankle.”

“But you carried out Rosemary’s wishes.” I aimed for the bright side. We had finished Nonie’s bed and I wanted to keep the conversation going as long as possible.

“Well—” Mrs. Jones began, but could not go on. The trembly corners of her mouth seemed to be fighting against the stoic slabs of her cheeks and making them twitch.

I made smoothing motions with my palm on Nonie’s newly made bed and lowered my eyes. I knew better than to prod Mrs. Jones with my imperious what? which worked so well on Flora. I waited, wondering if I would at last see this stolid woman cry.

But after a ragged breath she went on. “The day after the lake, when I was resting with my feet up, Rosemary spoke to me. Only she sounded different. She sounded …”

A second ragged breath. “She sounded like a much older girl. ‘Mama,’ she said, ‘I want you to listen carefully. Are you listening?’

“I said ‘I always listen to you, you know that, deary.’ And then she said—in this voice of a much older girl—‘What I keep having to remember, over and over again, Mama, is that you are older now. You could have hurt yourself bad down there at the lake and there would be nobody to take care of you. I have to be more careful what I say. Maybe it would be better if I stopped saying anything.’

“‘Oh, don’t do that,’ I begged. ‘I look forward to it so much. Please don’t do that, deary. It would break my heart.’”

I waited until Mrs. Jones had picked up her polishing cloth and started in on the furniture, applying her respectful weekly swipe to Nonie’s purse on the dresser. She was her steady self again, the one about whom Nonie had said, “I admire that woman. Despite all her adversities, Beryl Jones manages to stay in control of her days.” But Beryl Jones seemed to have forgotten I was in the room.

“What did Rosemary say?” I finally burst out.

Mrs. Jones folded over the dust cloth to a clean place and began on a lampshade. The monolithic slabs of her cheeks lay perfectly still now. “I haven’t heard a peep from her since.” She gave an odd dry laugh. “But I’ve been talking a blue streak to her. I sat for the better part of two days with my feet elevated and I talked and talked. I said, ‘You know what, deary? I’m not the only one getting older. You’re growing up, too. I can tell it from your voice. You’re getting to be a responsible young woman who wants to take care of me and I love you for it.’ And, you know, I’ve felt her close by. And something else: the more I sat there and talked a blue streak, the more I could feel my ankle healing.”


TUESDAY EVENING WAS the mystery program Flora and I liked. The recent ones hadn’t been as good as the one about the little girl who turned into a mannequin, but we felt from the start that this one had potential. “I’m getting goose bumps already,” announced Flora, curled up at the other end of the sofa from me. From the cabinet radio’s big speakers came the sound of the ocean going in and out against mournful, eerie background music. A twelve-year-old boy, Julian, whose parents have died, has become the ward of his aunt who lives on an island. You could tell at once from the aunt’s voice that she isn’t going to be much comfort. She is an old maid wedded to her solitary schedule. She paints pottery with island scenes and sells it to the tourists, and her pet words are livelihood and self-sufficient. When she speaks of Julian’s parents it sounds as though they have gone and died on purpose so she would be stuck with him. But a boy his age is lucky to get to live beside the ocean, she keeps reminding him, and he will have to be self-sufficient and find ways to amuse himself during the day while she earns their livelihood.

Julian takes long walks against the mournful, eerie background music, missing his parents, until one day he comes upon a ruined beach cottage with DANGER and DO NOT TRESPASS signs all around it. An old fisherman tells him there was a bad fire years ago and then the property kept changing owners who never got around to rebuilding it and now it’s going to be torn down because it’s become a hazard for children who want to play in it.

Of course, as soon as the fisherman leaves, Julian picks his way through the ruins and discovers to his delight and surprise that there is an old couple living quite happily in one small undestroyed room. They are just as delighted and surprised by him. Their names are Ethan and Peg, and they can’t get enough of him. They want to know everything about his life and all about his parents, even the sad parts, and they tell him his aunt can’t help but come to cherish him, he is such a fine boy. They once had a fine boy his age who died in the fire when this cottage belonged to them. The boy’s name was Luke. Soon the cottage will be torn down and they will have to leave, they tell Julian, but it has been a privilege to stay on for as long as they have in this place where Luke was last alive.

Julian visits them every day. He is so eager to go out in the morning that his aunt grows curious and asks what he has been up to. She praises him for being so self-sufficient. He doesn’t mention the ruined cottage because she might forbid him to go there, but he says he is really getting to love the ocean and he hopes he’s not upsetting her schedule too much. And she says no, she’s getting used to having him around and then confesses in a softer, new voice, “In fact, Julian, I would miss you if you weren’t here.”

At this point Flora buried her face in her hands and wailed.

Then the day comes when he heads for the cottage and you can tell by the urgency of the music that this time it is going to be different. The cottage has been demolished at daybreak. The old fisherman is on the scene and Julian asks him, “Did they get the old couple out safely?” “What old couple?” the old fisherman asks. Julian tells him about Ethan and Peg, whose son, Luke, was killed in the cottage fire. “Son, are you joshing me?” asks the old man. He tells Julian that all three of those people were burned to death in that fire back in the 1890s, the son and the father and mother. Everybody on the island knew the story and Julian must have picked it up from some old-timer who got the facts slightly wrong.

“But I saw them,” says Julian. “I saw Ethan and Peg. We talked.”

“Sorry, son, that won’t wash with me. I grew up on this island and I remember how they looked when they found them. Try it on some newcomer.”

Then Julian describes the couple, and finally the old fisherman says, “Lord, if that don’t sound exactly like I remember them. Even down to his sideburns—they called them muttonchops in those days—and her way of asking people all about their business. But look here, son, there are some things beyond rational explaining. You say they were kind to you and got you through a bad time. Well, if I were you I would be grateful for that, but I would keep it to myself.”


THE THEME MUSIC swelled, and now the announcer was reminding us that this program had been brought to us by a wine “made in California for enjoyment throughout the world.”

“Want to turn it off?” Flora asked. “Or would you like to listen to something else?”

“No, no, turn it off. And don’t turn any lights on.”

“Okay.” Flora wafted through the gloaming, and the orange fan-shaped panel on the big console went dark. Already the days were getting shorter. You could tell the difference between now and when we had listened to the program about the girl who becomes a mannequin. Then, as though she was intent on obeying my unspoken wishes as well, Flora returned to her end of the sofa and reassumed her knee-hugging position.

“Were you scared?” she asked.

“No. Were you?”

“Not scared, no.” Her face merged into the surrounding blue dusk, but you could still make out the dark outline of her hair. She was close enough so I could smell her shampoo mingled with the perspiration at the nape of her neck. “I just thought it was perfect. How about you?”

“I did, too.”

As darkness filled the room, we floated companionably in our separate thoughts. I was still enveloped by the kind voices of Ethan and Peg, and even the softening aunt, and vibrating with the strange possibilities aroused in me by the program.

“Oh, Helen, please tell me you haven’t been too bored this summer.”

“Not too bored,” I conceded.





May 21, 1944

Dear Flora,

How sweet of you to remember me with a Mother’s Day card. This is the first chance I have had to sit at my desk in relative quiet and answer your letter tucked inside it. Goodness, child! I hope I am up to all your faith in me.

Helen is spending Sunday with a favorite friend. She went home from church with him. And Harry is dashing around getting ready to drive over the mountain to Tennessee for a summer job. He’s going to manage a construction crew for some top-priority war work at Oak Ridge. It’s called the Manhattan Project and Harry says it’s amazing how the minute you drop the name to the Ration Board they are all over themselves to shower you with permits for anything you want. It was one of those word-of-mouth opportunities that came about through our rector. The chaplain out at the Episcopal Academy had signed on, and he told Father McFall (our rector) that they were desperately looking for responsible people used to exercising authority who didn’t have to work during the summer months. I haven’t seen my son so excited for years. He can’t wait to leave.

Now, Flora, where to start? You say you have no faith in yourself and you are afraid when you go out into the world people will “find you out.” What are you afraid they’ll find out? That you have no faith in yourself? Well, think what you’d be like if you did have faith in yourself and then act as though you are this person. The way she presents herself. The way she walks, enters a room, what she says—and what she does not say. I cannot stress the latter part enough. “Spoken word is slave; unspoken is master,” as the old adage goes. Just keep in mind that people do not read minds. They judge by what they see and hear, and you are a well-favored young woman with a modest, unaffected voice. Just let those two things work for you. You will be surprised how far they’ll carry you. Hold yourself like someone who sets value on her person and remember that a simple, courteous response will get you through practically anything. You don’t need to be witty (some people just aren’t gifted that way) or tell private things about yourself or your family.

You warm this old heart the way you lavish praise on me, but I am basically just a country girl without much education who has tried to keep her dignity and make the most of the cards dealt her. As I sit at this handsome desk my son restored for me and look around me on this quiet afternoon (and yet the world is at war) in our safe house on top of this mountain, I am astonished that things have turned out for me as well as they have. And my wish for you, Flora, is that when you reach my age you will be able to say the same—and much more!

Yours truly,





Honora Anstruther





XIX.




Dear Rachel,

You cannot imagine what a horrible


Dear Rachel,

How is the pool?


Dear Rachel,

Little did I know that the week with you would be the best


Dear Rachel,

I certainly hope your summer has been better than mine

How could writing a letter be such torture? I had expected that sitting at my grandmother’s desk and using her writing materials would work some kind of spell and out would flow the words I needed to mend my fences with the Huffs. But so far I had crumpled four sheets of Nonie’s good stationery and I couldn’t even throw them in the wastebasket because Mrs. Jones would discover them and think less of me. I knew the effect I wanted my letter to have (to soothe Rachel’s hurt pride, to reestablish me in Mrs. Huff’s graces so she wouldn’t stand on street corners saying bad things about me), but after what seemed like hours I was no nearer my goal than these four infantile, though correctly spelled, openings.

Rachel was a horrible speller.

The trouble was … What was the trouble? I didn’t really care about the Huffs all that much, but needed them to like and admire me. Was there something left out of my moral makeup, or did I just require more social lessons in how to act as if I cared? I could see Flora, for instance, scrawling a heartfelt letter that would redeem her with the Huffs. But, then, Flora wouldn’t need to be redeemed because she would have written a thank-you note in the first place. No, wait a minute! Didn’t Flora neglect to write Nonie after spending a whole week in our house after my mother’s funeral? (“we have been worrying and wondering ever since you left. We never heard from you”)

Oh, it was not easy when you had lost the person who had taught you how to act. I took a fifth sheet of stationery from Nonie’s box and tried to hear what she would advise if she were in the room.

Think what it would be like if you did care about them, darling, and then write the letter. Be simple and modest and don’t complain. Don’t make excuses for the delay, it only reminds them of the delay. The letter doesn’t have to be long. In fact, it’s better if it’s not long. That way they will be better able to read into it what they need.


Dear Rachel,

I hope you are having a good summer. I had a really nice time at your house. Please tell your mother hello for me and thank her for her hospitality. See you back at school. I really can’t wait.

Your friend,





Helen





Oh, hell. I had used really twice. Which would be worse? To waste another sheet of Nonie’s good paper or to have Mrs. Huff think my writing style was childish?

Flora was upstairs, working on her lesson plans for her real class in Alabama. This morning in our fifth grade she had assigned the children to be different parts of speech and get together in small groups and form sentences. It was something our English teacher had done with our class, but I let Flora think it was my idea. She said I was brilliant and then her usual thing about how she hoped she didn’t have anybody as smart as me in her real class or she wouldn’t know what to do. I thought it was all right to take credit for the parts of speech idea since I had run myself ragged being everyone in all the groups, from Suzanne the Noun and Brick the Verb to “Milderd” the Preposition and Jock the Interjection.

Deciding that childishness might work in my favor in this particular letter, I addressed a matching envelope to Miss Rachel Huff, put a three-cent Victory stamp on it, and headed down what Finn called our holy terror of a driveway to be in time for the postman. I pictured Rachel scuffling down her driveway, kicking up as much white gravel as she could, and finding my letter in their box. She would rip it open the brutal way she opened her presents, scan it with a shrug, and take it back to the house to show her mother. “Well, well, better late than never,” Lorena Huff would say. She would read it over several times, cheered by my childish reallys. I wasn’t that superior to her Rachel, after all. “You know, Rachel, maybe we’ve been too hard on Helen. The poor child can’t be having a good summer. You can tell from all she doesn’t say. You notice she doesn’t mention that excitable cousin, and you can tell she misses our house and the pool.”

It wasn’t lunchtime yet, so I went to sit in Nonie’s car and go on with my story of how it would be when Finn came to live with us. Any branch of the story could lead to satisfying little branchlets. Finn’s driving lessons could turn into the first time he lets me drive to school and how everyone sees me with him in the passenger seat, or it could take us on a trip around town where I point out significant landmarks of my history. (“That house over there was my grandfather’s first lodge for the Recoverers, but you have to keep in mind that this was a better part of town back then and things looked much nicer …”)

“Guess what?” Flora greeted me when I came in for lunch. “Finn called.”

“Did he ask for me?”

“Well, he seemed ready to talk to whoever answered.”

“What did he want?”

“Mr. Crump had told him we were worried about him, and—”

“I wasn’t worried. Maybe you were.”

“What happened, honey? You were in such a good mood this morning.”

“What happened was I spent the whole rest of the morning writing a stupid letter.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t stupid. You couldn’t be stupid if you tried. Was it to your father?”

“I’m not writing him again until he writes me. If you must know, it was to the Huffs.”

“It’s none of my business. I didn’t mean to pry.” Then, typical of Flora, she undermined her whole argument by asking was there any special reason I was writing to the Huffs, or was it just to say hello.

“It was a thank-you letter I forgot to write sooner. But I think it’s better to write a thank-you note late than not to ever write it, don’t you?”

“Oh, I definitely do.” I had expected her to blush or bury her face in her hands at the memory of her own rudeness, but my accusation went right over her. “Anyway, Finn said he wanted to fill us in on what’s been happening to him, so I invited him to dinner.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Was that okay?”

“Did he sound good or bad?”

“Good, I think. Maybe he’s heard something from that military board and he can start making plans for his future. I said we were only having Juliet’s wartime meat loaf recipe, which goes heavy on oatmeal for filler, but he sounded eager to come. I’m glad I still have some of Juliet’s dried oregano left. Maybe I’ll make some of her cheese straws for starters.”

I was dying to say “Juliet who?” just to get her goat, but, looking ahead to the happy day when the Willow Fanning room would be empty and Finn would be settling into the Starling Peake room, I said, “I want to watch you make them so I can do it for my father after you’re gone.” She looked so pleased that I generously added, “But we will always call them Flora’s cheese straws.”