Flora A Novel

XX.


Finn looked more presentable, somehow. Since his last visit, his hair had grown out enough from its spiky crew cut to lie flat on either side of a part, and his beaky face had acquired a becoming layer of color. He wore a neatly ironed khaki shirt and trousers and some brown, military-looking shoes. He had brought us a bunch of fragrant roses in a variety of colors from the garden of the old lady who kept forgetting things, only he now referred to her as Miss Adelaide, and explained he had been watering her garden and feeding her cat while she recuperated in the hospital from a fall.

“Cats prefer to stay in their own home even without their owners,” he said.

“So do humans,” I pointed out, which struck me as a very witty comeback except that Flora sideswiped it by asking if poor Miss Adelaide had broken anything. She very luckily hadn’t, Finn said, though she was bruised all over her body from head to toe. Into my overexcited brain popped the image of a naked old lady showing Finn her bruises from head to toe and out of my mouth burst a childish snort of laughter, which embarrassed all three of us.

“But we want to hear what’s been happening to you,” said Flora, taking Finn lightly by the arm and steering him into the living room. “Is there any news from that military board you met with?”

“No final decision yet,” said Finn, settling into his former place on the sofa. “But if a person can guess when he’s made a good impression, I’d say there’s hope.”

“Can you talk about it?” asked Flora breathlessly, sliding in next to him, “or is it a confidential matter?”

“Sure, I can talk about it—with friends,” said Finn. “But to fill you in properly I’d need to go back a little. Ah, I was hoping you’d have that lemonade again.”

“And Helen made the cheese straws.”

“Not totally,” I corrected her. “You were standing right over me.”

“Well, you shaped them completely without my help,” insisted Flora, which drew attention to their rather clumsily twisted bodies on the serving plate.

“Let him go on,” I said.

“Well,” Finn began again, “I have to go back a little for it to make sense. Maybe as far back as September of ’forty-three, coming up two years ago, when we docked at Liverpool. There were five thousand of us on this transport ship built to carry one thousand. A bit crowded, but there you are. But it made our Nissen huts in the English countryside where we ended up seem like little palaces at first. My company was training hard, building foxholes, perfecting our skills of loving the ground. Remember, Helen, on our little … er … walk that day”—his eye caught mine to signal our secret was still safe—“and I was telling you how we learned to use the ground to keep ourselves alive?”

“I remember,” I said, looking meaningfully back.

“Then the weather turned cold and wet and many of the men came down with asthma or pneumonia. Pneumonia was your first choice because asthma was considered a chronic thing and they transferred you to a desk job. When I was diagnosed with pneumonia, I danced for joy because I could still be cured in time to make the big jump we’d been practicing for two years.”

I could picture Finn dancing for joy the way I had seen him do it that day in the crater. Flora couldn’t have such a picture because she didn’t know we’d been in the crater together and she never would.

“Then my lung collapsed and this one doctor saw scar tissue on an X-ray which he thought was a sign of tubercles, and I was evacuated so as not to infect others.”

“You had TB?” I asked excitedly.

“Don’t be rushing me, darling.”

“Sorry.” But it was the first time anyone had called me darling since Nonie died, which somewhat lessened the shame of his reproof.

“As it fell out, I didn’t have TB, but they weren’t sure till they got me to the military hospital here. And then there was the long recovery from the collapsed lung, and I missed the big jump on D-Day.”

“Well, I’m glad you missed it!” Flora cried. “So many boys were killed!” She had her arms crossed over her chest and was rubbing them up and down, the way she did during our scary programs.

“Ah,” said Finn, not rebuking her for interrupting but giving her an appreciative nod as if she was helping him along. “Which brings us to the second part of my sorry tale, how I joined the ranks of the mentalers. By now I was all clean in the X-rays but I still had to undergo a regimen to build back my lung power. Every day we … Recoverers (I love that word) were driven out to a mountain near the hospital and had to walk up and down a trail, a bit farther each day, and have our breathing monitored. The big jump had happened without me, but I was expecting to be sent back overseas soon. The D-Day casualties had been heavy and there was plenty of fighting left to do. Then, one day they told me I had a visitor and I went down and there was my mate Barney’s mother. Barney and I had gone through jump school together and he was in the Nissen hut with me in England. While we were training in Georgia, he had taken me home on leave to his mother’s apple orchards, which he was going to run as soon as the war was over. She was a widow and he was the only child. When I came into the reception room, she gave me a strange smile and said I looked a little fatter than when I had visited. She had ridden the bus up from Georgia, she said, to bring me some baked goods and a few keepsakes. She hadn’t said Barney’s name, but as soon as she said “keepsakes” I knew he hadn’t made it. She said she had heard “from overseas” that I had been sent home to this place. I knew it must have been in a letter from Barney in the winter of ’forty-four. Still there was no saying of his name. It was like we were in a contest not to be the unkind one to speak it first. Then she said she’d brought a drawing I’d done in the Nissen hut, it was in the tin, along with a snapshot of me taken at her house. I knew she meant my drawing of Barney because I remembered him sending it to her. When I said she should keep it, she said she’d rather not. Still no saying of his name, and then she switched to asking about me and the state of my health and she was smiling that strange smile again.”

“How was it strange?” I needed to know.

He didn’t say “don’t be rushing me, darling” this time, but gave it some thought. “It wasn’t a friendly smile,” he presently said. “It was more what you’d call a malevolent smile. Like there was something more to come that you weren’t going to like. Only I didn’t know yet what that something was.”

Flora, still rubbing her arms up and down, hung on to his every word.

“I told her my lung was healed,” continued Finn, “and that I was expecting to be sent back into combat: there was still the war to be won. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘well, I hope you see some action, if that’s what you want. Maybe there will be more jumping to do.’ Then she said she had a taxi waiting and a return bus to make and she was glad I had been spared. I was touched by her being able to say that just as I was extremely touched that she’d come all this way, and I must have made some move toward her, but she shoved the tin of baked goods into my hands and said, ‘He didn’t get to make the jump because their plane was shot down. A few of them jumped and then it was shot down. You could have been on that plane, waiting your turn to jump. Though maybe with your good luck you’d have been one of those first few who made it out.’ And then came that smile again and she said, ‘You know what I keep asking myself? Why couldn’t he have been as clever as you, getting yourself evacuated like that?’ And then she was gone.”

“Oh!” cried Flora, unclasping herself. “What a dreadful thing to say!”

“If I hadn’t been hugging that tin to my chest, the whole thing could have been something I’d dreamed,” said Finn.

“You must have felt awful,” said Flora, whose eyes were predictably brimming.

“I felt nothing, nothing at all. Instead, there were these important tasks I had to fulfill to set things right.”

“What kind of tasks?” I asked.

“Oh, very logical, orderly tasks. Or they seemed so to me. They presented themselves to me in a very logical and orderly fashion, one after another, hour after hour, day after day, and within a week or so I had crossed right over the line into madness, following my logical, orderly little list. First, I had to obtain the names, ranks, and serial numbers of every man in the stick—the eighteen paratroopers carried by each C-47 make up a stick. Then I had to ascertain the fate of each man: Did he jump or did he go down with the plane? And if he made it to the ground, did he survive and accomplish his mission or—Then it got more and more complicated and more and more specific. What was his mission if he lived and where, exactly, was he buried when he died? I can tell you, I made a nuisance of myself with the hospital staff. I required all this special information and I told them they had to go through the channels and get it for me quickly because lives were at stake. ‘Don’t you realize much of this stuff is still under censorship?’ they said. Until they started looking at me differently and saying, ‘Don’t worry, son, we’re taking care of it. In the meantime, swallow these pills and get some rest.’ But somehow I escaped back up that mountain we had to climb to strengthen our lungs. I don’t remember at all how I got there, they say I must have slipped out of the hospital during the night and hitchhiked. When they found me at the top of the mountain I was wrapped around a tree, starkers, covered with leaves. Just as well we were having a warm November. Not that I thought so when they found me. It took three of them to hold me down. They had aborted my final mission, you see. I was supposed to exchange myself for Barney.”

“What’s ‘starkers’?” I asked.

“Without any clothes,” said Finn.

“What happened then?” Flora asked.

“Oh, then, I found myself in another wing of the hospital, talking to mental doctors rather than lung doctors, and then one day last spring I found myself signing papers for a medical discharge. The thing about the medical discharge is that you still receive certain benefits—for instance the Army continues to pay for my visits to a psychiatrist, but other benefits, like education, are forfeited.”

“Like the GI Bill,” moaned Flora. “But Mr. Crump did say your father had pulled some strings and they might upgrade the discharge so you could get it after all.”

“That’s the plan,” said Finn, looking suddenly impatient with the whole subject. He chose one of my crippled cheese straws, bit into it, and pronounced it perfect, which I thought was going too far.


THE PHONE RANG while the three of us were having dinner.

“It could be my father,” I said, jumping up to take the call in the kitchen.

It was my father, unusually talkative. He went on and on about the huge complex they were building, going into minute details about the ductwork and the roofing and how he’d gone to the local jail to spring one of his crew who’d drunk too much and reportedly had a “dangerous concealed weapon” on him. “I had to explain to the sheriff that Willie was a roofer and the ‘dangerous weapon’ was a roofer’s tool for cutting felt.” He sounded so pleased with himself and was talking to me as an equal, only why had he picked just now to call? I stood on one foot, then the other. I leaned against the kitchen counter and studied my distorted reflection on the back of a dessert spoon. I could hear a hushed, intimate exchange going on in the dining room. Finn was probably telling Flora the parts about going mad that he had judged best to leave out when “the child” was with them. How perverse life was. Nothing came at the right time.

“You and Flora getting on all right?” At last my father was winding down, or so I thought.

“Oh, yes. You want to talk to her?”

“Not specially. Unless you think I ought to.”

Though it would be good to get Finn to myself in the dining room, what if Flora forgot and revealed that we were having company? My father would start off being prejudiced against Finn for violating the quarantine, which could put an end to my plans for the Starling Peake room.

“Not specially,” I said back.

“Where is she now?” my father asked.

“Probably working on her lesson plans or writing a letter.” I was speaking low.

“Flora’s letters!” My father snorted. “Mother spared us those, didn’t she? She couldn’t dispose of them fast enough. Who is left for Flora to write to?”

“That colored woman who lives with them. She writes to her every week, she …”

But my father was now attacking the next thing. “Lesson plans! How happy I’d be never to see the inside of a schoolhouse again.”

I was shocked. “But what would you do?”

“Oh, stay here at Oak Ridge. They’re turning it into a little town. The pay is good and there’s plenty of building left to do.”

“But what would I do?”

“You’d go to school, just as you do now. They’ve built a school here. We could have a little house. I wouldn’t have to live in a men’s dormitory if you were here. What do you think?”

I could hardly reply. “Are you joking, or what?”

“Maybe I am, maybe I am. I’m feeling light-headed tonight.”

“Where are you?”

“I drove out a little ways—can’t drive far with this rationing. There’s a nice lake where they’ll make you a sandwich with a pickle and you can rent a boat. If you were here, we might take a boat out.”

“But what about our house?”

“I take it you mean Old One Thousand, the old death trap. We could sell the damn thing. Start a new life with no ghoulish emcun—cum—cumbrances.”

Only when he messed up encumbrances did I realize they were providing him with more than a sandwich and a pickle at the nice lake.

Which would I have hated more? For him to have been sober and serious about our starting a new life and moving us off to a place in the middle of nowhere, or for him to have fallen off the wagon and be “flying high,” as Nonie used to call it, when he had imbibed just the right amount to tease her with fantasies of how he was going to escape, one way or another? Fortunately, “just the right amount” always sloshed over into the darker hour where he crashed to earth and we three remained safely together on top of our mountain.

Of the two options, I preferred the sloshed safety of Old One Thousand.


“MY, YOU TWO did some talking,” said Flora. “I guess your father didn’t want to talk to me.” She and Finn had assumed that innocent look of having said nothing of any importance while I was away.

“He asked about you, but we had a lot to talk about.”

“How is he?”

“He was at some lake, having a sandwich. He said if I was there we could take a boat out. I told him we were doing fine here.”

“That was nice of you, honey.” Then more to Finn than me she said, “In a little over a month I’ll be teaching fifth grade in Alabama. It seems hard to believe.”

“I’ll be starting sixth grade.” I said. “And my father will be back as principal of the high school.” I looked at Finn. “Where do you think you’ll be?”

“I’d rather not be thinking till I know, darling. Maybe I’ll still be right here. Finn, your deliverer.” With a resolute laugh he improved on it: “Finn, your Recoverer-deliverer.”





December 12, 1938

Dear Flora,

If I were you, I would put out of my mind what you overheard in your house. One person was crying hard, you say, and the other person was very angry, and words aren’t necessarily heard clearly when someone is crying hard and the other person is spluttering with anger. Also, when we’re angry we snatch at straws and make up things to hurt the other person. I think that is what happened. He was afraid he was going to lose his share of the house and wanted to accuse her of something that would scare her. So he snatched at something that could put her in real danger. What was especially odious was that the other person being accused had just died and couldn’t defend himself. And, as you say, it was cruel for the accuser to insinuate that the long and trusting friendship between the two who raised you was something else, especially when that something else is against the laws of the land.

But I have written more than is wise and must ask you to destroy this letter.

As you say, Flora, people we trusted can be downright treacherous. I could furnish you with a few examples but I have buried them in my heart and I advise you to do the same. To end on a positive note before I take Helen off to the Recreation Park, let me assure you that we are never “completely helpless.” A person always has control over how she meets her adversities, and the good news is that the facing of them, one after another, year after year, builds an inner strength that nobody can take away from you.

Yours truly,





Honora Anstruther





XXI.


There was a sink in the Starling Peake room, which wasn’t officially called that because, though he had been charming, he had let everyone down. When I was little I asked Nonie why that room had a sink and she said it was a consolation prize because it was inferior to the other rooms.

“Why was it inferior?”

“It didn’t open onto a porch.”

“But the other Recoverer’s room across the hall doesn’t open onto a porch either.”

“No, but that room gets the morning sun and is next to the bathroom.”

When I was older, I asked my father the same question about the sink and he said because a man could piss in the sink without having to walk to the bathroom.

“But what if a woman was staying in there?”

“We only had one of those and she had the big front room with the private half bath.”

“The Willow Fanning room,” I said.

“I wish Mother would leave off her precious room naming. It’s been a quarter century since this has been a halfway house for rich malingerers. We don’t need their old ghosts rattling around: we have enough of our own to avoid stumbling over.”


I COULDN’T IMAGINE Finn pissing in the sink, and didn’t want to. Besides, there would be no need for him to. Flora would have gone back to Alabama and my father would be at school all day and if Finn were using the upstairs bathroom or taking a bath when my father was home, my father would make use of the half bath in the Willow Fanning room, or go downstairs, which he would probably prefer to do anyway so he could freshen his drink.

Finn’s recent visit to us had gone downhill after dinner. When we adjourned to the living room for coffee and pound cake, Finn brought out his sketchbook and said he wanted to do a portrait of Flora. After her predictable fluttery protests, he arranged her in Nonie’s wing chair because he said that had worked so well with me last time. I sat beside him on the sofa, which was nice at first, but then he became so rapt with his subject that there seemed to be a lit-up path between him and Flora that left the rest of the room in darkness. He was oblivious of me, but Flora kept darting nervous little glances to see if I was getting resentful or bored. When she asked me how the picture was coming along, I couldn’t very well say, “He’s making you prettier than you really are,” so I borrowed Mrs. Jones’s phrase and told her it was going to be suitable for framing.

“Oh, we will, we will!” exclaimed Flora.

“Please, love, don’t … move … your face,” Finn said.

“Sorry,” said Flora, but she flushed up at his use of the love word.

When he was done and she finished uttering her little yips and saying he’d made her nicer-looking than she was, he reclaimed the sketchbook and said, “I’ll take it away with me, then, and work on it some more. Give you a squinty eye and a few whiskers.” Then they had a mock tussle, after which he still insisted on keeping it in the sketchbook to work on some more. And she got all emotional and said, “How I wish I could draw. Then I would have a likeness of you to take back with me to Alabama.”

Only at the tail end of the evening did I manage to get him to myself by following him out to his motorcycle. “Listen,” I said (I had rehearsed this): “We have some nice empty rooms upstairs, and when it starts getting cold in Crump’s storage attic, you could move in here. I’ll discuss it with my father. I’m pretty sure he’d welcome the company.”

He looked surprised, then laughed. “Will I be one of your Recoverers, then?” He stooped and gave me a hug. “We’ll have to see, darling,” he said. “We’ll have to see how things fall out.”

But he had also given Flora a hug. And called her “love.”


IN THE LAST days of July, Flora’s and my fifth-grade class languished due to sudden breakdowns and interruptions at Old One Thousand. First, the garbage truck got stuck in a rut and we had to call a tow truck and the garbage man yelled at us that he wasn’t coming again until we got our f——ing driveway fixed.

“Please, sir!” cried Flora. “There’s a child present. Her father is off doing important war work in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and it will be fixed as soon as he returns next month.” She began to cry softly and also the driver had heard of Oak Ridge, and he and the driver of the tow truck ended up fashioning a makeshift bridge of planks over the rut and gratefully accepting coffee and hot corn bread from Flora in the kitchen before they left.

Then the downspout that had been hanging tipsily sideways from the gutter fell down across the lawn—or former lawn.

“Oh, dear,” moaned Flora, “we’ll have to get someone.”

“Leave it till my father gets back,” I said. I didn’t say that I was hoping he might surprise us and show up for my birthday, which was a little over a week away.

“Well, I don’t know, honey. Nobody likes to come home and see pieces of their house all over the ground. It looks like someone hasn’t been taking care of things.”

“It’s just one piece, and you can’t even see it when you drive up. You’re only supposed to be taking care of me, not the house.”

But Flora decided to phone Mr. Crump at Grove Market, to ask if he knew of a “reasonable” carpenter, and Finn answered and said he could do it if we had a ladder, which we did. He asked if it could wait until the weekend and Flora said it could and thanked him too profusely.

Then the toilet in the Willow Fanning half bath got clogged, and Flora cried and said now everyone would blame her for flushing something down it when she hadn’t. She phoned the plumber listed in Nonie’s little “Majordomo” book, but the number had been disconnected. “And I can’t call Mr. Crump again,” she wailed.

“Why not? He’s bound to know a plumber.”

“Because, don’t you see? Finn might answer again and offer to fix it himself when he comes to do the gutter and that would be humiliating.”

I saw Finn kneeling in front of Flora’s toilet, pulling out something disgusting. It made me want to laugh, but not for long. It would reflect on me, too, and make him not want to live in our house.

But Flora fetched the plunger and went at the Willow Fanning toilet so violently it choked up an enormous soggy wad, which she insisted on my inspecting. “I want you to see there’s nothing in it but toilet paper. But it’s still my fault, I’ve been using too much. At home, Juliet had this rule: two squares for number one, four for number two, unless it was—”

“Okay, okay!”


I SET TO work on my refurbishment of Starling Peake’s old room, which I was already secretly calling the Devlin Patrick Finn room. There wasn’t any deep cleaning to do; Mrs. Jones had been faithful with that. The floor was regularly vacuumed, the windowsills scrubbed, the curtains and bedspread laundered, and the furniture polished—though there was way too much furniture. The two “lesser” Recoverers’ rooms had become repositories for castoffs, like my father’s Persian carpets that had tripped him once too often and twiggy-legged tables and plant stands and framed pictures and mirrors turned to the wall.

I first thought I’d tell Flora I was fixing up this room for when new friends came to stay over. But I had grown so adept at predicting her responses I could hear her ask why I didn’t put them in my old room downstairs. So instead I told her I wanted to make a study upstairs for myself.

“But, honey, why that gloomy old room? If you want an upstairs study, why not take your grandfather’s consulting room, with all its nice shelves?”

“That’s for family trophies and things. And my father goes in there to look things up in books.”

“Oh, in that case. But wouldn’t the Recoverer’s room across the hall be more cheerful? It gets the morning sun.”

“I don’t always want to be cheerful. I like gloom, too. Besides, when I get home from school it will be the afternoon.”

“That’s true,” she conceded.

“I just have a feeling about that room. I like it.”

“I wonder if—?”

“What?”

“Your mother kept her clothes in the big old wardrobe in there. I remember going in and sniffing them after her funeral. There was still her scent. Maybe rooms can—Oh, I don’t know, honey. It’s your house and you can pick whichever room you want. I should learn to keep my big mouth shut.”


IN STARLING PEAKE’S old room was a hulking old cheval dresser with a tilting mirror. Its drawers were crammed with the saddest detritus you could imagine. Each item must once have had a purpose but now gave up its history to a meaningless mound of junk. The prospect of emptying the drawers was so depressing I decided to wait for Mrs. Jones.

“What do you want to do with all this?” she asked, after a grim survey.

“I want it not to be in there.”

This prompted one of her rare closed-mouthed laughs. “Let’s take it out, then, and lay it down on a cloth. You can go over it better that way.”

“One drawer at a time, or all three?”

“Oh, let’s get it all out.” She made it sound like a daring proposal.

She found an old quilt in the wardrobe and spread it out on the bed.

“Flora said my mother used to keep her clothes in that wardrobe.”

“She did. There wasn’t enough room in your father’s closet.”

“I wonder where they went.”

“Your grandmother gave them away. I helped her box them up. It was hard for her. She set great store by Miss Lisbeth.”

“Do you remember my mother?”

“Well, naturally I do.”

“Did you like her?”

“She was always very nice to me. I didn’t see much of her because she was at the high school all day with your father. The only time I got to know her a little was the spring and summer she was expecting you. She would rest on the bed in here sometimes.”

“In this room?”

“She said it was cooler and she liked being out of everybody’s way. When I was going over the room we would talk.”

“What about?”

“Oh, she asked what it was like when I was expecting Rosemary and if I had been as big and felt as awkward in my final months. I told her I had a much bigger frame than her and could carry the extra weight better and that I had been born awkward. This cheered her up. Usually she had a book or two on the bed with her. If she was reading we didn’t talk, unless she spoke first.”

“What kind of books?”

“Schoolbooks. She couldn’t wait to go back to her teaching. One time she read a poem to me about a lady who had to stay in a room with her back to the window. She couldn’t look out directly or she would bring down some kind of curse, but she rigged a mirror so she could see the reflection of the road below and could watch life going on through the mirror.”

“What was that poem?”

“I don’t rightly recall, but I do remember her saying this room was like it because you could look out the window and see the road down below, only she didn’t have to use a mirror.”

“But how could she see the road from the bed?”

“The bed was over by the window, then. You could lie on it and look down through the trees and see Sunset Drive. It’s all blocked in now, but you could still see the road back then.”

Checker pieces with no board—a perfume atomizer—a rusty harmonica with dust in the holes—a shaving brush with stiff bristles—a crudely carved wooden giraffe with its broken neck glued back on—empty gift boxes and folded Christmas wrapping paper—string and ribbons—a cloudy magnifying glass—a tarnished sugar spoon with something crusty in its bowl—a cutglass bottle of dried-out smelling salts—an empty tin of Sears, Roebuck gunpowder tea filled with rubber bands and paper clips—pen nibs and pencil stubs—boxes of rifle cartridges—a small square porcelain dish with a scene of trees and a lake and HANDPAINTED IN NIPPON written on the bottom—a used elastic bandage—an ivory cigarette holder—a silk sleeping mask—a guide to palmistry with the cover torn off—an extension cord—two buckeyes—a silver flask (no monogram) without its top—a rubber stem syringe with a red bulb—an empty box that said: “German Liquor Cure: 24 doses”—a sealed pack of playing cards—a Standard Accident Insurance Company of Detroit date book for 1923 with “nb” faithfully recorded in pencil for every day in the month of January, followed by empty pages for the rest of the year—a small tarnished silver tray stuffed inside a wad of tissue and brown paper; on the tray was engraved the profile of a bird and ALABAMA, THE YELLOWHAMMER STATE.

“I’d go over each item with a damp cloth before you lay it out on the bed,” Mrs. Jones had suggested before leaving. “If there’s things you’re not sure what to do with, we can look those over when I come next week.”

The sorting-out part took longer than I expected. There were things I knew I shouldn’t throw out, even though I wanted them out of the room. There were some puzzling objects that I wanted to look at some more before I consigned them to the trash. And there were a few things that might be of use to Finn: the extension cord and the sealed pack of cards, and the buck-eyes for good luck—I could tell him about the local legends if he didn’t know them. But he definitely wouldn’t want someone’s disgusting old shaving brush or a flask with no top, or even if it had a top because he was on the dry. Each survivor of the trash I carefully wiped down before placing it on the bed. (Would Finn like to have his bed moved back to the window?)

When at last I surveyed my final collection on the bed, I ferociously regretted the loss of Annie Rickets.

(“Oh, boy, let’s get to work. There are different ways we could do this, Helen. We could each take one patient at a time and pick out items for them and then deduce their secrets from their items, or we could go item by item and decide who it belonged to, and then—No, that’s much too infantile for us: my first idea is better. I’ll go first if you let me start with the Willing Fanny. The sleeping mask is definitely hers, and probably the cigarette holder, and she has to have the perfume atomizer, unless one of the male patients was a fairy, and also the smelling salts, and I think she should have the crusted spoon—a ladylike slurp of opium for the long, boring afternoon ahead at Shangri-la. Oh, sorry, I’m taking too many? Okay, you can have the opium spoon back. But I have to insist that syringe is hers, because it’s not the kind you use for enemas, it’s what women use when they need to shoot water and Lysol up inside them. My mammy has one and she says it has kept us from being a family of ten. That date book could be a man’s or a woman’s, so I won’t be greedy. But I’ll bet anything those nb’s stand for either ‘no blood’ or ‘no booze.’ The ‘no booze’ is if they were on the wagon. The other could be either someone who’s missed her period or, more boringly, a former tubercular who’s counting his good days. Breaking off like that could mean they fell off the wagon or got her period or didn’t get it, or, in the case of the tubercular, the blood came back and he expired.”)

Flora was standing in the doorway. “Supper is ready when you are, honey. Goodness! What is all that?”

“Junk from the drawers in here.”

She approached the bed. “It’s not all junk. That’s a perfectly good extension cord, and, look, what a sweet little painted dish—”

“I know. I’m sorting it out. I just don’t want it in those drawers, in a big clump, where it’s been laying useless for years—”

“Oh! That’s our calling card tray!”

“Whose calling card tray?”

“The one we sent to Lisbeth for a wedding present. Where did you find this, Helen?”

“I told you. In those drawers.”

“Just … lying with all the junk?” She scooped it up and cradled it in her palms.

“No, it had lots of paper around it.”

“What kind of paper?”

“Just the brown paper things get mailed in. And there was some tissue paper, too. It was all scrunched up together.”

“Where is it? Did you throw it away?”

“Yes, but it’s still in the trash basket over there.”

Already she was at the basket. “Oh, God, here it is!” Now she was pulling apart the brown paper from the tissue. Such a frenzy over some old wrapping paper. “Oh, I don’t believe this! The card’s still in here!”

“I didn’t see any card.”

“Here it is. Oh, my daddy’s own sweet handwriting.” The tears were at the ready. “All of us signed it. See?”

She proudly showed me the signatures on the card: a younger Flora’s, the bold scrawls of the men, and, familiar to me from her letters to Flora, the proper slant of Juliet Parker.

“It is sterling silver,” said Flora. “Juliet picked it out, but we all contributed. But why did Lisbeth stuff it away with all that junk? Still in its paper! I wonder if she even saw the card.”

“Who says it was her? It was probably someone else after she died. They saw it out on a table and said, ‘Oh, what is this for?’ and then put it in the drawer.”

“No,” said Flora, cradling the little tray like a wounded animal. “It wasn’t ever out on any table. When I stayed here that week after the funeral I looked everywhere. I understand now. I was a fool not to see it before. Lisbeth hated it. She was ashamed of it. Just another piece of Alabama trash.”

“That is just ridiculous,” I said (though suspecting she might have a point). “You really need to have more faith in yourself, Flora. And if you don’t have it, you at least have to act like you do.”

“That is exactly what your grandmother would have said,” marveled Flora, regarding me with fond respect.

“What is a yellowhammer anyway?”

“Why, it’s our state bird. It’s the sweetest little woodpecker with these bright yellow underwings. Juliet has three yellowhammer boxes in our backyard. My daddy made the boxes for her. They have to be made just so. When the babies fledge, our whole backyard is aflutter with yellow wings.”

As we went down to supper, I had to congratulate myself for deflecting Flora from her trash talk and staving off those ready tears. There had not been a single tear shed. I felt like a proud parent who, after hard work, sees her child growing into sociability and self-control.





XXII.


It was the last Sunday in July. Then there would be next Sunday, and two days after that, August seventh, would be my birthday. My father had not written or phoned since he was having his sandwich and pickle out at that lake. I chose to interpret his silence as meaning that he planned to surprise me by simply showing up on my birthday.

Today was a sultry, overcast Sunday like the Sunday Flora and I had taken the taxi to church and heard the awful news about Brian. And then Father McFall had driven us home and we hadn’t been down the mountain since.

But at least it wasn’t raining, which meant that Finn would be coming to fix the gutter in the afternoon.

Lately I had been composing scenes where my father and Finn would meet, maybe as soon as my birthday. I made myself do it two ways. First I had to imagine my father finding something in Finn to scorn, and then, before I could allow myself to go on, I had to figure out what that thing would be. Finn’s orange spikes had grown out into an acceptable head of hair, he looked less like a wraithlike outsider since he had gotten some sun weeding the old lady’s garden; and the only time he had been really silly was when he had danced for joy at the bottom of the crater, and nobody had seen that but me. Finn was friendly, but not “familiar,” which my father couldn’t stand in people, and he spoke well, even with his funny will we’s and a-tall, a-tall’s. He showed no signs of having been “a mentaler,” the type of person who would escape from a hospital and wrap himself naked around a tree trunk in order to exchange himself for a dead friend.

Having gone through the negatives and discounted them one by one, I could then move on to the Finn who would catch my father’s interest, charm him, and eventually earn his respect. This was a much pleasanter proposition, and I approached it so well that I kept getting excited and losing my place and having to start over. The consummation point I worked toward in these scenes ended with the two of them (with myself present, of course) in animated dialogue, each at his best: my father witty and slightly world-weary but without the sarcasm and Finn sweet and caring in his masculine way, without any hints of mental problems. And then Finn would say something, maybe about me, and my father would say, “Look here, why don’t you join forces with us in this crumbling old pile? We’ve got lots of empty rooms if you don’t mind a few ghostly encumbrances.” “Ah, if you mean the Recoverers,” Finn would say, “Helen has told me about them and I wouldn’t mind them a-tall, a-tall. I’d be honored, Mr. Anstruther.” “Please,” my father would say, “call me Harry.” And then they’d toast it with cocktails that I would mix. Maybe just one for Finn, if he was still on the dry. But you needed a cocktail for a toast.

And then the whole project had collapsed in a miserable heap because I had forgotten to include Flora. Flora would still be here on my birthday. She had to be somewhere in the picture, and if she were my father couldn’t be asking Finn to live with us yet. Also who could predict how she might derail things or what unwelcome bit of information she might blurt out at any time? My imaginative powers had made a serious miscalculation in timing and logistics, and I was disgusted with myself.


AT LUNCH, FLORA said, “Listen, Helen, what should we do about supper?”

“We’re still eating lunch.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Finn is coming to fix the downspout.”

“So?”

“Well, I haven’t asked him to supper.”

“You haven’t?” I had just assumed she had, even though there hadn’t been her usual agonizings over which Juliet-dish to prepare. “Why ever not?” (One of Nonie’s pet phrases.)

“Well, I didn’t want him to think we’re running after him.”

“Why on earth would he think that?” I was stalling for time, Nonie-like, until I figured out how to get the upper hand.

“Because … Oh, I don’t know. You think we should ask him?”

“Oh, no. Just let him come and fix our gutters for free, and then say, ‘Oh, thanks, bye now. Hope you’re not hungry or anything.’ “

“Oh, dear.” The tears were mobilizing.

“So he’ll climb on his motorcycle and ride away thinking, I wonder what I did to make them not like me anymore.”

“I’m going to call him right now.”

“Now, that would look like you’re running after him. Besides, the store’s closed on Sunday. Just wait until he comes this afternoon and say we’re having a light supper, nothing fancy, but he’s welcome to stay.”

“But, he’ll be all sweaty and might feel he should wash.” She seemed to have given this previous thought.

“Well, let him wash here. We certainly have enough bathrooms.”

“In that case, what should we have?”

“You’ll think of something. You always do.”


BUT FINN ALREADY had supper plans. Miss Adelaide, the old lady who was losing her memory and had bruises from head to toe, was back from the hospital and was making him fried chicken and waffles to thank him for taking care of her cat and her garden.

“Oh, chicken and waffles, I can’t compete with that,” said Flora, folding her arms and looking away to hide her mortification.

“Don’t be like that, love. If I had known—”

“No, it’s my fault,” Flora eagerly rushed on. “I didn’t ask earlier because I was afraid you would get sick of seeing us, but then Helen said she wanted you.”

“I did not.”

“Ah,” Finn teased me, “so you didn’t want me.”

“That is not what I meant.” I could have killed Flora for getting me into this trap. Why did she have to proclaim her every self-doubt from the rooftops? Now both of them were anxiously regarding me: the child who might fly off the handle. Well, I would show them. “He is going to get sick of us,” I scolded Flora, “if we won’t let him get on with what he came to do.” Toward Finn I was all business. “Come on,” I said, “I’ll show you where the extension ladder is.”

But once the two of us were in the garage, I relented. He stopped to run a hand lovingly down a rear fender of Nonie’s car. “Nineteen thirty-three Oldsmobile Tudor touring car,” he said like an incantation. “We won’t see its like again.”

“I wish we could drive it,” I said.

“Well, why can’t you?”

“Because Flora never learned to drive and I’m too young to get a license.”

“Are you saying you can drive then?”

“No, but if somebody would teach me I would have a head start.”

“Flora never learned to drive?” he asked just as I was getting ready to add that maybe he would teach me.

“None of her people in Alabama learned. They couldn’t afford a car.”

“That’s no cause a-tall. A lot of folks drive who don’t own automobiles.”

“The school she really wanted rejected her because she couldn’t drive.” Might as well show interest in what interested him, since I had missed out on my chance.

“Ah, was she sorely let down?”

“She cried, but that’s what she always does. She said she wished she had told them she could drive and then had someone teach her before school started.”

“What a shame,” Finn said angrily.

“But she’s real excited about the school that does want her. And some man she met at her interview wrote and said he’d be glad to teach her to drive.”

“I’ll bet he would,” Finn said. “Has anyone been charging the battery?”

“I wasn’t sure how.”

“Turn the key and let the motor run is all it takes.”

“I think the battery is dead,” I said quickly because he was starting to look annoyed with me. “In fact, I’m sure it’s dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because a man came and tried, but it wouldn’t start.” I had almost said the man was Mr. Crump, but Finn might check. Let it just be a man.

“That’s a shame,” said Finn.

“My father will see to it when he gets back,” I assured him.

“Well, it’s still a bleeding shame,” said Finn.

I helped him carry the long extension ladder, which he set up at the needy corner of the house with a great deal of shaking and rattling, and then when he had fastened on his tool belt and climbed to the top, Flora and I did our part by lifting up the downspout pipe and holding it steady until he had reattached it to its gutter.

“That should do it, ladies,” he said.

“That’s all?” said Flora, looking woefully up at him. “You mean you’re finished already?”

“With that little task I am. But while we’ve got the ladder up, will I have a look at the other gutters all around the house? I could bail out some of the gunk while I’m about it.”

“Well, I—Helen, what do you think? It’s your house.”

“That would be really nice of you,” I said to Finn on the ladder. “If you’re sure you have the time.”

“Oh, I have. Miss Adelaide doesn’t want me till half past six. What I’ll need, though, is something to put the gunk in.”

“I’ll get a bucket,” cried Flora, already running for the house.

“Are you going to need two people?” I called up to him.

“Come again?”

“Will you need two of us for the bucket part? I’ve got something I need to do in the house.”

“You run on then, darling. Your cousin and I will manage fine.”

“Will you come and say good-bye before you leave?”

“Sure I will. Where will I find you?”

“I’ll be upstairs. It’s easy. You turn left at the top of the stairs and it’s the first room. I’ll be working in there. Will you come when you’ve finished the gutters?”

“I will. But it might be an hour or so. Is that all right?”

“Perfect. I have something I want to show you.”


AT LAST, AT last, I thought, triumphantly racing up the stairs—stairs Finn would be climbing for the first time in “an hour or so”—I am learning how to get people to do as I want. Flora didn’t count. She was too easy, too much like someone my own age. No, not even that. She was easier than wily Annie Rickets; easier than Rachel Huff, whose sullen moods somehow insulated her like a black cloud from the demands of others; easier, even, than tranquil Brian Beale, so congenial to play with but stubbornly set in his ways when it came to what he wanted us to play.

It was almost ready, the Devlin Patrick Finn room: the room that had not been named for Starling Peake because he had let us down, the room my mother had chosen to lie and read in when she was expecting me. The drawers of the old cheval dresser had been emptied and lined with paper (the perfectly good extension cord, the sealed pack of cards, and the two buckeyes placed neatly in the top drawer for Finn); I had cleaned its tilting glass with vinegar and newspaper, the way I had seen Mrs. Jones do it, and I had shined the mirror above the sink, where Finn’s pointy face would look back at him when he shaved. (“We’ll need to get a desk or a table in here,” I heard myself telling him, “but we waited to see which you preferred for your artwork.” “One thing this old pile has plenty of,” my father might add, if he was accompanying us, “is furniture. You’ll trip over it and bust your head if you’re not careful.”)

If only I hadn’t told Finn, “I’ve got something I need to do in the house.” He probably thought I had to go to the bathroom. I should have said, “I’ve got some work I need to do in the house.” But aside from that I felt I had developed my social arts this summer, even in all our isolation, and had to concede that Flora had contributed to my progress. Flora, however easy, had provided me with a round-the-clock living human specimen to practice on.

There was one thing left to be done before Finn came upstairs, and it turned out to be harder than I had expected. I wanted the bed to be back at the window, the way it was in my mother’s time, but in my impatience and frustration in moving it I made an ugly gash in the floor. I dragged my father’s oriental rug over it, but that left a big square of bare floor that was lighter than the rest because it had been under the rug for so long. There was nothing to do but drag in the other oriental rug from the other Recoverer’s room to cover the naked square. The result was a success, but it had worn me out. I lay down on my mother’s old bed by the window, thinking of the poor lady in the poem who had to watch life through a mirror, and felt myself sinking alarmingly toward a childish nap. But that would be all right, too. Finn would come up and wake me, like that day when I crouched like a catatonic by the side of the road. “Hello, hello,” he would say, bending over the bed. “Is anyone there?”