Flora A Novel

XXIII.


Once, when I was five, I took an afternoon nap and woke up and found things had been done without me. Before the nap, Nonie and I had been sitting on the sofa coloring together. I always did the characters in the picture and allowed her to color in the background, which she did in such a way that enhanced my artwork. It was a superior coloring book, or at least I’m remembering it that way. The paper was smooth, not porous, the pages lay flat, and the pictures were from myths, fairy tales, and the Bible. The picture was on the right side and its story was on the left side. We always read the story first so we could get an idea of how the picture ought to be colored in. I don’t remember the picture we had finished before Nonie said, “Someone looks sleepy,” and walked me to my room, but I remember some of the pictures in the book. There was Cinderella and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Noah receiving the dove telling him the coast was clear, and Ruth and Naomi, and Joseph in his coat of many colors (but not what his brothers were going to do to him on the trip) and Aladdin and Pandora, and Psyche holding a candle over Cupid while he slept. The coloring book was called A Color Book of Old Stories. I still look for it sometimes online, but have never found anything remotely like it. For a while I had this fantasy that I would suddenly hit on it, A Color Book of Old Stories, and order it, and when it arrived I would get some crayons and turn to the page in question and redeem my lost colors.

When I woke up from my nap and went looking for Nonie, I found her sitting on the sofa with the closed coloring book on her lap. She looked guilty when she saw me.

“What did you do while I was asleep?” I demanded.

“Well, I colored another picture,” she said, an odd blush rising in her cheeks. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“Which one? Let me see.”

She turned to the one of Pandora opening the chest full of bad things, the entire picture colored in with her choice of colors. “Is that all right?” she asked rather sheepishly.

“That’s the one I was saving—to do BY MYSELF!”

“Then I have overstepped.”

I looked with disgust at the pink-cheeked figure in her blue gown. Pandora’s dress was supposed to be blackish purple, her face chalk white with dark shadows from what she realizes she has set loose on the world. And the sinister faces and writhing bodies of the plagues and sorrows floating out of the open chest that I had been planning to do one by one in devilish, jarring colors, Nonie had crayoned over so they all looked submerged in a watery green effluvium.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Nonie said. “But you’ve still got Aladdin, which has a similar story.”

“I wanted Pandora,” I said.




WHEN I WOKE up from my nap in Finn’s future room, I immediately had the feeling that something had not happened, but I did not begin to imagine all that had happened without me.

The light in the sky was too late for it to have been just an hour. I had drooled on the bedspread. It was very quiet outside. He didn’t come was my dismal thought. Then I heard a man’s voice in the living room below. Then a clink of a teacup in a saucer and Flora’s eager-to-be-impressed response, then the man again. His voice was deep and harsh, at the other end of the scale from Finn’s spun-glass tenor, and he spoke in blunt clumps, like someone who liked making his points more than he liked making friends.

I got up and checked my woozy self in the cheval glass, but that part of the room was in shadow, so I went across the hall to the mirror in the big bathroom. I looked for signs that Finn might have washed up in here, but the fresh hand towels were folded just as Mrs. Jones had hung them.

As I crept down the stairs it occurred to me that the man was probably Mr. Crump, returned for more of Flora’s corn bread—and probably with another unwelcome offer to buy Nonie’s car. But it was a much older man than Mr. Crump on the sofa beside Flora, having tea from a pot and pound cake.

“There you are!” cried Flora.

“Where is Finn?”

“Oh, honey, he had to go. He had his dinner engagement with Miss Adelaide.”

“He promised to come upstairs before he left.”

“He did, but you were sound asleep in your new office. He said he couldn’t bear to wake you.”

“It’s a study, not an office.” (It’s not going to be a study, either, but you won’t know that.)

“Sorry, honey, study.”

Holding his teacup and saucer aloft in front of his chest, the old man impertinently danced his beetle-black eyes on my distress.

“Helen, do you know who this is?” Flora asked.

“I’m … not sure.” He was an old man in a Sunday shirt and a stand-up tuft of wispy white hair and those rude little beetle-black eyes. I might have met him before, but I couldn’t think where.

“This is your grandmother’s half brother, Mr. Earl Quarles,” she announced as though she were presenting royalty.

It was the Old Mongrel himself, sitting on our sofa inside our house.

“Stepbrother, not half brother,” I corrected.

“The young lady’s right,” the Old Mongrel spoke up. “Honora and I were no relation. But I thought the world of her.”

I lingered resentfully against the archway separating the living room from the hallway. How had this happened? My father would be beside himself with disgust. If people did such a thing as turn over in their graves, Nonie would be doing that right now.

“How about a slice of pound cake, Helen?”

“I’m really not hungry.”

“Well, come in and keep Mr. Quarles company while I get more hot water.”

“Not for me,” said the Old Mongrel. “I reckon I ought to be getting along home.” But Flora was off to the kitchen with the teapot and he made no move to leave.

I walked sedately across to Nonie’s wing chair and sat facing him.

“I haven’t had a cup of pot-brewed tea since my wife died,” he said, with the return of the singsongy whine I recalled from the funeral home. “Now they just serve you up a bag with lukewarm water on the side and call that tea.”

Unwilling to make small talk about tea bags, I sat erect on the edge of the chair and stared at him.

He put down his cup and saucer. “You favor her,” he said.

“Who?” I was not going to help him.

“Honora. Your grandmother. You must miss her a heap.”

I certainly wasn’t going to respond to that, even if he started to think I was a cretin.

“She wasn’t much older than you when we met. Oh, me, it was a bad day for her.” He uttered a wheezy, almost soundless laugh. “Hated me on sight. Well, I don’t blame her. But after a while we made friends. She ever talk about me?”

I could barely shake my head. My lips felt pasted against my teeth.

“I was nine years older. So there was a period there when she was still a child and I was already a man, but then that changed and we were more like equals. But she was always smarter than me. I knew that right from the start. Smart and high-tempered.” Another wheezy chuckle. “Oh, me.”

Oh, God, Flora, where are you?

“What grade are you in school?” Even a slow-witted child could answer that.

“I’ll be going into sixth.”

“Your daddy’s the principal, isn’t he?”

“He’s principal of the high school.”

“That’s what I thought. I was looking at some acreage that’s about to go on sale at the top of your hill this afternoon and thought I’d drop by and pay my respects to him. But your cousin says he’s over in Oak Ridge doing some important war work. How old is your father now?”

Never ask a person’s age, I had been taught practically from infancy. “My father is the age of the century,” I said, which would show that I knew his age without actually saying it.

“Oh no, he couldn’t be.”

This was too much. “I guess I ought to know my own father’s age,” I said as coldly as I could.

“With all due respect, young lady, you must have got your figures wrong.”

“My grandfather wrote a poem on the day my father was born. ‘Midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this December morn / a boy is born.’ It’s in a book upstairs in my grandfather’s consulting room. The date at the bottom of the poem says December the eighth, nineteen hundred. That’s my father’s birthday.”

This silenced the Old Mongrel. He looked gratifyingly flummoxed. And my small victory was that I still hadn’t said my father’s age.

Flora came back with the pot just as he was heaving himself up from the sofa. “Oh no, Mr. Quarles, you’re not leaving?”

“I better be getting on home, Miss Flora. My cataracts don’t operate so well when the dusk sets in.”

“I hope you and Helen got a little acquainted.”

“Oh, I would say we did.” Standing up, he was taller than I expected. “She takes after Honora all right.” Again the almost soundless, wheezy chuckle. “Well, you all have been very kind to me and I thank you for your hospitality. At least I got to meet the young lady and your nice friend, and I’m glad I could help with the Oldsmobile.”

Looking down at me he explained, “We jumped Honora’s batteries with my cables and gave Miss Flora her first driving lesson while you was having your nap. She needs to mash on the brake less, but she’s going to do real well. She’ll tell you all about it.”

Flora and I stood outside the kitchen door and watched the Old Mongrel’s big, sloping car with whitewalls cautiously bump down our driveway.

“That is the last Packard Clipper model they made before we entered the war,” said Flora dreamily.

“How do you know that?”

“Finn told me. He worked on cars like that before he joined the Army. He says Mr. Quarles must have money.”

“Of course he has. He got all the inheritance that was supposed to go to my grandmother. What I don’t understand is how he got inside our house.”

“Well, I invited him, Helen.”

“If I had been awake, that would never have been allowed to happen.”

“But he and your grandmother grew up together, honey.”

“Oh, grew up together,” I said bitterly. “People are always growing up together, according to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was nine years older than Nonie and my mother was twelve years older than you. You can’t ‘grow up together’ when there’s that much difference in your ages.”

“What on earth has gotten into you, Helen?” At last she had picked up on the fact that I was shaking with rage.

“My father would never have let him in the house.”

Now she blanched. “Why not?”

“Because. He’s an old mongrel. That’s what my father calls him: the Old Mongrel.”

“What has he done to deserve that?”

“He’s a crook. He tried to bribe the funeral director to make him open Nonie’s casket.”

“Well, that’s not exactly a crook, honey. He probably wanted to see her one last time. You heard him say how much he thought of her.”

“He’s ill-bred. He asks people’s ages. He says ‘while you was having your nap.’ “

“Everyone doesn’t speak the King’s English, Helen. Mrs. Jones slips up on her grammar and you are very fond of her.”

“You leave her out of it. She stays in control of her days and Nonie admired her. And he’s a sneak and a bully and thinks nothing of taking what isn’t his.”

“Goodness, where did you get all that? I’ve never heard you even mention him before.”

“I got it from Nonie and my father. I never mentioned him because the last thing I expected was to take a nap and wake up and find you’d polluted our house.” I was starting to cry for the first time in front of Flora, and this made me all the more angry with her.

“Now, listen, Helen, that’s enough. I think you ought to go off by yourself and cool down before supper. We’re having spaghetti. I used up the last of Juliet’s herbs for the sauce.”

“I don’t want her f*cking sauce and I’m sick of eating! I’m sick of you! I can’t wait till you leave!”





XXIV.


I remember feeling, after my blowup that Sunday, that I could still give myself credit for some adult restraint. I hadn’t actually cried. I hadn’t hit. In the past, even the recent past, I had sometimes hit Nonie in aggravation, but during this summer I had never once hit Flora. Okay, I had lashed out verbally in a childish way—and gotten a child’s satisfaction from the instant response—but I knew I could still reap some longer-term benefits if I apologized. I wasn’t really sorry about using my father’s worst swearword. It was a thing men said, but if a female used it sparingly it had great shock value. I had shocked Flora. Then I had hurt her by saying I was sick of her and would be glad when she was gone. But though Flora was easy to hurt, she was also an easy forgiver. When I went off to cool down, as instructed by her, I used that time by myself to compose my scene of contrition.

I knew even while screaming at Flora that I was going to have to apologize later, because my goal was to get along with her on the surface for the rest of the summer while keeping my serious schemes to myself. First, though, I checked myself over for wounds and then laid out the pluses and minuses of the afternoon. I had first done this after Flora’s one outburst—if you could call it that—when I had been snotty about refusing to send my picture to the Alabama people, and she had lost control and “told me things” about my mother’s selfishness and cruelty. What I had lost that other day was my illusion that Flora adored my mother unreservedly, but what I had gained was valuable information as to what Lisbeth had really been like and the realization that I wouldn’t be sorry to behave with her cold expediency under similar circumstances. It felt gratifying being allied with my mother in this way.

Today’s losses and gains weren’t as simply tallied. Finn hadn’t come up to say good-bye; or, rather, he had come and couldn’t bear to wake me. The Old Mongrel had been in our house, and I would have to tell my father; but the downspout had been reattached and the gutters cleaned, which would please my father and make him like Finn. Nonie’s batteries had been charged; but Flora had been given her first driving lesson as a result. The Old Mongrel had referred to Finn as “your nice friend” when he was thanking Flora: had his ‘your’ meant Flora and me, or had he thought Finn was Flora’s boyfriend?

The best way to apologize, according to Nonie, was to come right out and say you were sorry and get it over with. You didn’t have to belabor it, but you did have to convince the other person you were sincere.

As we were spreading our napkins in our laps—Flora used old prewar paper ones from the pantry when we had spaghetti—I stayed focused on my lap and murmured, “I apologize for what I said. I didn’t mean it, I was just mad.”

“Oh, Helen. And I’m sorry, too. I had no idea how you felt about Mr. Quarles. And I know you didn’t mean … all you said to me.”

She went on some more, overdoing her forgiveness and her gratitude for my apology, and how she had no idea, et cetera, until I felt it was time to get her off that subject.

We twirled our spaghetti. I thought of saying something nice about Juliet Parker’s herbs in the sauce, but couldn’t trust it to come out sounding a hundred percent sincere. “You know what I really want to know?” I asked.

“What, honey?”

“How did it feel to drive?”

“I can hardly claim I drove, honey, with Finn right next to me, ready to grab the wheel if I messed up and Mr. Quarles shouting his advice into my open window.”

“But where did you go?”

“What do you mean where did I go?”

“Did you go down our driveway and onto the road?”

“Goodness, no, honey. We just went around and around the house on that old circular driveway.”

“But that thing’s so overgrown you can barely walk on it!”

“Well, we flattened it down some with our big car,” said Flora with more satisfaction than I cared for. “And Finn is going to ask Miss Adelaide if he can borrow her scythe and work on it some more.”

“For more … driving lessons?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Finn says I will be driving before I go back to Alabama. Who would have ever thought! If only I had kept my mouth shut during that interview.”

“Spoken word is slave,” I said. “Unspoken is master.”

“That’s just what she would have said! But it would still have been a lie, wouldn’t it? Not speaking up can be a lie, too.”

“I guess.”

I couldn’t wait to go to bed. Shut the door to my room, climb between Nonie’s sheets, and let this day drain out of me. When I woke up it would be the next day, and that day would be one day closer to my birthday. I had decided my father was going to come. He had to come, because I needed him to. If I could just get to my birthday and have some support, I could make it through the remaining weeks until he was home for good and we put Flora on the train to Alabama.

“You want to listen to anything on the radio later?”

“No, I’m too tired.”

“Oh dear, I hope you’re not coming down with something. Your father would never forgive me. But where could you have gotten anything?”

If I hadn’t been so depleted, I could have tormented her a little. From the strangers you keep inviting into the house for hot corn bread and milk. And pound cake and “brewed tea.”

“No, I’m just really tired. I moved some furniture around upstairs.”

“Oh, right, for your study. You go on, then, honey. I’ll clean up. And then would you like me to bring you anything in bed? Some milk? One of your Clark bars?”

“No, I’ll already have brushed my teeth. I just want to sleep.”

After I got into my pajamas, I took down the hatbox from the closet shelf and removed Nonie’s hatpin from the new hat. I replaced the hatbox. I fingered around in her purse until I found the hatpin’s sheath and stuck the pin back in its sheath. I held it in my closed right hand and put my left hand on top. “You have got to help me get through these next days,” I told the hatpin. “And make my father come for my birthday.” Then I placed it under my pillow, arranged myself between the crisp sheets marked MASTER, squinched my eyes shut, and willed myself into oblivion. But I went on being awake. I heard Flora’s clatter as she finished putting away the dishes, then her footsteps on the stairs and going down the hall, then the Willow Fanning door opening and closing, then the toilet flushing in the Willow Fanning half bath. I reminded myself that a month from now I would be lying here listening to more agreeable sounds coming from other people in the house as they finished up their day and settled down for their night.


“I KNOW YOU didn’t like Mr. Quarles, Helen, but I did enjoy hearing him talk about her when she was a young girl.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, that she was a grand cook, even with their old wood-burning stove, and she could wring a chicken’s neck without making a face, and milk a cow and ride a horse bareback. He also said she was high-tempered.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“Well, I think he meant it as praise. After all, he didn’t say hot-tempered, or bad-tempered.” Flora giggled. “Though he did say she could hold grudges like an elephant.”

“From what I heard, there was plenty to hold grudges about.”

“You said something about that, uh, yesterday.” Flora was curious, but I could see she was also nervous about starting things up again.

“He had so many bad traits it was hard to single one out. He was a bully and sneaky and thought nothing of taking what wasn’t his. And he had his eye on the farm and was willing to tell lies about her to get it.”

“She told you all that?”

I nodded.

“I wonder what he took.”

“What wasn’t his.”

“Oh, well, it was a long time ago, and it worked out all right for them both, didn’t it?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, your grandmother married the wonderful doctor and had your father, and you, and Mr. Quarles thought the world of his wife.”

“He says that about everybody,” I reminded her.

“No, from what he said they were real happy. They didn’t have children, but she was a big help to him in his business. He wasn’t much of a farmer, he told me, but he knew how to buy and sell land. He kept a few acres for corn and a couple of cows and his wife kept these pet chickens—for eggs, not for eating—but what he really likes is discovering land that loggers have ruined. He clears it and then sells it to people who want to build houses on it. That’s why he happened to be up here. He—”

“I know, he told me. He was looking at some acreage about to go on sale at the top of our hill.”

“So you two did get to talk some. He told us when the men come home from the war they’ll want starter houses to raise their families in. Finn thinks he’s going to make a bundle without so much as lifting an eyebrow.”

“You can’t make a bundle unless you have something to start with,” I explained world-wearily. “And what he had to start with was Nonie’s property.”




FLORA WAS GETTING ready to leave in her mind. She had begun saying nostalgic things like “I’ll never forget the time we …” and “I’ll always remember when we …” She was already bundling her memories of this summer into little packages, like Juliet’s herbs, to take back to Alabama. I could hear her telling other teachers at her school about our fifth-grade game: “My little cousin was just so smart. She made up this whole class full of children for me to practice on and played all the parts herself.” We had discontinued playing Fifth Grade when things around the house started breaking down, and then somehow the time was past for that game. I had my “study” (a.k.a. the Devlin Patrick Finn room) to work on, and Flora, with her driving lessons to look forward to in the late afternoon, had to fit in her meal preparations earlier in the day. Finn had cleared the old circular driveway with Miss Adelaide’s scythe and I had helped him neaten it some with a rake. My father was going to be so pleased with all our improvements. Finn still had not been given a decision about his discharge status.

“They’re taking their time,” he told us. “They’re waiting to see whether I’m truly recovered or whether I’ll go balmy again.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” cried Flora. “Not even as a joke.” We were sitting around the dining table. Finn often stayed for dinner with us now, after the driving lesson. Flora had promised him not to go to any special trouble.

The latest letter from Alabama had given Flora something else to think about. “Uncle Sam has offered to buy Juliet’s share of the house so he and Aunt Garnet can live there when they get remarried.”

“But where will Juliet live?”

“She could come to Dothan and live with me.”

“Did she ask if she could?”

“Oh, Juliet would never do that. But I’ve been thinking how nice it would be.”

“But—”

“But, what?”

“Would she be like your maid?”

“I’ve told you, honey. Juliet is not a maid. We would keep house together. She would have her own money.” Flora laughed. “With the money from her share of the house, she would have a lot more than me.”

“But what about when you get married?”

“Who said anything about my getting married?”

“All these people keep asking you.”

“Who?” she demanded, flushing.

“The farmer with the truck you didn’t ride in to the interview, and the lawyer with hairs in his ears.”

“Oh, those,” she said. “Well, there will always be a place in my home for Juliet, whether I marry or not. And I will always have a guest room for you, Helen. Maybe you’ll miss me and want to visit. You could ride down on the train and I’ll take you to all the places your mother knew as a girl. I’ll have my license by then. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even have a car.”

She was obviously looking ahead.


THOUGH WE WEREN’T playing Fifth Grade any longer, I was often upstairs in “my study,” daydreaming about when Finn would live in this room. From here it would have been easy to slip next door into the Willow Fanning room and take away more of Nonie’s letters to read. But here, too, Flora had been looking ahead. The letters were all bound together again and tied tightly with the ribbon, in a hard-to-imitate bow, ready to go back into Flora’s suitcase. Next to them was the smaller pile of Juliet Parker’s weekly missives. Without any ribbon, they would be easy to steal away and read if I wanted to. But I didn’t, not in the least. It was while pondering this one morning, while looking down at the two piles, that I realized I didn’t really need to take the risk of reading more of Nonie’s, either. I had found out some things, been disappointed at not finding other things, and hadn’t been caught. What more was to be found out, and would it be worth getting caught for?

It was sad, in a way. Like our Fifth Grade, the time now felt past for the letters as well. It was like the summer light, which was changing into autumn light around the house. If the Recoverers were still here, they would be leaving the south porch earlier now and carrying their books and blankets and cards over to the west porch to take advantage of the last sun. I was moving over into something else, too. Rather than wanting to dig into old things that had already happened, I was pouring all my time and imagination into preparing a place for the new things that were going to happen after Flora was gone.

Mrs. Jones said the two oriental rugs made the room look more lavish.

“And the bed looks nice by the window. Did you have trouble moving it by yourself?”

“A little. I may have scratched the floor some.”

“Where?”

I lifted up the second rug and prepared to be lectured.

Mrs. Jones knelt down so her nose was practically level with the floor and ran her finger back and forth over the wood. “Well, you did a job, didn’t you?”

“I’m sorry. I was just rushing, and that bed was heavier than I thought.”

“Doesn’t pay to rush.” Now she had laid down her cheek on the floor and was inspecting the damage sideways.

“Is it bad?” Would she feel obliged to tell my father?

“Not too bad. As long as it stays under the rug. I’ve seen worse. But we ought to doctor it a little so it can get better while it’s under the rug. Go downstairs to the pantry.”

“Downstairs to the pantry,” I repeated.

“On the lowest left-hand shelf, toward the back, you’ll find a little brown bottle with a handwritten label that says ‘linseed oil.’ “

“Who wrote it?”

“Your father. It’s one of those stick-on labels with a red edge. Linseed oil.”

“Linseed oil,” I repeated. “Will that fix it?”

“We’ll make a start,” said Mrs. Jones, rising cumbersomely to her feet. “In future, though, try not to be in such a rush.” She was breathless and had to steady herself against the wall for a minute, and I felt bad.

I had changed my mind about showing Finn his room. I wanted the circumstances to be as perfect as possible. More important, I had realized I ought to talk it over with my father first. What an awful thing it would have been to have shown Finn the room and invited him to live there and then have to go back and tell him my father had said no. Just the thought of having brought on such a near disaster made me cringe.

So for now I kept the room for myself. I liked lying on the bed Finn might soon be sleeping in, if I could only manage everything in a mature and diplomatic way. I liked reading the new book Mrs. Jones had brought from the library. This one, a book of fairy tales from around the world, she had chosen herself, and had read some of the stories herself before bringing it to me. Her favorite was one from Denmark, “The Princess in the Coffin,” and I had read that one first so we could talk about it when she came next Tuesday, which was my birthday. And I also liked lying there and thinking of my mother, soon to give birth to me, lying in this same spot and wondering what I would be like.

The whole experience of being in Finn’s room was like lying in a hammock with my past, present, and future all tucked around me.





XXV.


Monday morning, the day before my birthday, Flora knocked on my door earlier than usual.

“I thought we’d wash your hair before you get dressed.” She had brought along the saucepan we used for rinsing.

“Why are you up so early?”

“I was lying in bed thinking of all the things I wanted to get done today, and when I couldn’t go back to sleep I decided to just get up and start doing them.”

“We always have breakfast first, then order the groceries before we wash my hair on Monday.”

“And you always have to get undressed again. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. I’m such a numbskull.”

“Well, wait a minute,” I said irritably. “I have to pee first.”

“Don’t you want to take off your pajama top?” she asked, when I was getting ready to kneel on the stack of towels beside the tub.

“I always leave on my undershirt.”

“Well, goodness, Helen, we’re both girls. Oh, what does it matter? I’m in a good mood today.”

“I bet I know why.”

“Why?” She looked guilty.

“Because you’ll be leaving in two weeks and four days.”

“Look who’s counted up the actual days. Don’t be silly, honey. I’ll miss you and I hope you’ll miss me a little. I’ll never forget this summer. I’ve learned so much I feel I ought to pay your father tuition.”

I bowed forward over the tub and thought, as I always did, about the guillotine. Flora ran the water to just the right temperature and poured panfuls over my hair until it hung down in one heavy mass. I groaned with pleasure at her deep, diligent lathering and was always a little sorry when the rinsing was over and every strand squeaked.

“Your hair is the color of wheat,” Flora mused, as she always did when toweling it. “And such a lot of it.”

“I wish I knew what I looked like,” I said.

“Well, have a look.” She turned me around so I could see myself in the full-length mirror: a pink, cranky girl in pajamas wet around the collar. “Finn says all your features are the right distance from each other. You notice things like that when you’re drawing someone, he says.”

“But that doesn’t mean pretty.”

“It’s better than pretty. It means you’ll look good even when you’re old.”

“I don’t care about when I’m old, I care about right now.”

“Well, there is one thing you can do for right now.”

“What?”

“Stop frowning. And when people come into a room, look happier to see them.”

After breakfast, we made our list and Flora called in the order. It was Mr. Crump on the other end, and, Flora being Flora, she sounded just as happy to be speaking to him as to Finn. Neither Flora nor I worried now if Finn didn’t answer, because we knew we’d be seeing him for the driving lesson at the end of his deliveries.

Flora’s big project for the day was the pantry. “I want to take everything out, scrub down the shelves, and then organize things better for you and your father.”

“Mrs. Jones can do that.”

“Yes, but if Mrs. Jones does it, you won’t think of me every time you go into the pantry to look for something.” She was indomitably cheerful today. Nothing new had happened that I was aware of. She had received no mail on Saturday. She had washed her own hair yesterday and sat on the west porch drying it. Finn hadn’t come because Miss Adelaide invited him to Sunday supper again. We had listened to the radio some and then gone our separate ways to bed. Maybe she had had a nice dream. What would a nice dream be for Flora? Which brought me back to my first reason: she was looking forward to leaving. She had done a good job “caring” for me and now she wanted to go back to her life. Was I hurt by this? A little.

“What did you do this summer, Flora?”

“Oh, I took care of my little cousin Helen up in North Carolina. Her mother and I grew up together. Her father was off doing important war work in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and he asked me to stay with her. Did you ever hear of the Manhattan Project?”

“How old was she?”

“Ten, going on eleven. Very smart. Helen certainly kept me on my toes.”

“But?” If Flora had a friend like Annie Rickets, she would poke at Flora until the negative things started trickling out.

Flora would be cheerfully loyal at first. Then she would say, “Oh, I don’t know. It was just the two of us alone up there on the mountain. This big old house. And at the start of the summer there was a polio scare. It never did turn into an epidemic, but her father quarantined us. We couldn’t go anywhere or have any company. But as he’d had polio himself it was understandable.”

“Nobody? For the entire summer?”

“Well, there was this person who delivered our groceries.” (I couldn’t decide whether Flora would call Finn a boy or a man.) “And the family’s minister dropped by to bring news of this little friend of Helen’s who came down with polio.”

“It’s a wonder you didn’t go crazy. I mean, what did the two of you do?”

“Oh, we had our schedule. I made the meals. Wait, I forgot the cleaning woman. She came once a week, on Tuesdays. And Helen and I played school, so I would be prepared for my fifth grade, and we listened to the radio in the evenings if there was something good on. In many ways, Helen was an easy child. She liked to go off by herself and read, and sometimes mope.”

“Mope?”

“Well, she missed her grandmother, Mrs. Anstruther, who, I’ve told you, was just the most—”

“Yes, yes, the most wonderful woman who wrote you all those wise letters you read over and over. I’ve heard all about her. Get back to Helen’s moping.”

“I don’t think she liked me very much at the start. She found fault with me a lot. Of course there are a lot of things about me to find fault with.”

“Okay, okay. We all know your low opinion of yourself. What did she find fault with?”

“Just my general way of being, I think. Her mother was the same. Even when she was being sweet to me, Lisbeth always thought I wasn’t good enough.”

“It’s sounding more and more like you had a perfectly awful summer, Flora.”

“I admit it had its tense moments. But there were also joys.”

“Oh? Let’s hear about those.”

“Well, as you know, I finally learned to drive.”


FLORA WAS SO caught up in her pantry reorganization that she could hardly keep still at lunch. I, on the other hand, felt so bad over the things I had imagined she would say about me to her Annie Rickets friend, that I made an extra effort to linger at the table and create some good memories of myself for her to take home. I complimented her on her thoroughness. (She had taken every single thing out of the pantry and set it out on the floor and washed down all the shelves.) I entertained her with the story of “The Princess in the Coffin,” which she didn’t know.

“Goodness, that was in a children’s—I mean, a book for young people?”

“Which part do you find so awful?”

“All those young soldiers she killed. I mean, the soldier who finally gets her out of her coffin and wins her love still has to look at all those bodies she tore apart and buried under the church floor.”

“It’s stories from all different countries. This one’s from Denmark.”

“Well, I’ll certainly be careful if I ever go to Denmark.”

“You’re a girl, you wouldn’t have to worry. It’s the men who—”

“Did you just hear a car, Helen?”

It was Father McFall. The minute I saw his somber countenance looking down on us from the other side of the screen door, I was sure he had come to tell me Brian Beale had died. He entered, took in the pantry items spread all over the floor, and raised his eyebrows at the silent radio on the kitchen counter.

“You two haven’t been listening to the radio?” he asked.

“We just finished lunch,” said Flora. “Has something happened? Won’t you come in?”

“Yes, thank you, I will, and yes, something has happened.”

Stalking ahead of us into the living room, he gestured for us to be seated while he continued to pace back and forth in his black clericals. “I take it you haven’t heard, then, about the bombing over in Japan. That’s good, I was hoping to get up here first. With all the reports coming in about Oak Ridge, I wanted to assure Helen there’s absolutely no danger. Everyone is fine in Oak Ridge. I’ve just been on the telephone with Chaplain Dudley, who’s working there for the summer in much the same capacity as your father, Helen, though on another site, and he assures me that no one there is in any danger.”

“Why?” I asked. “Are the Japs planning a bombing raid back?” Nonie and I had gone to see Mrs. Miniver twice and I was not unfamiliar with bombing raids.

“I don’t think the Japanese will have much stomach for any more bombing raids, Helen. The thing we dropped on Hiroshima is something new in warfare. It’s—” He searched for words, then threw up his hands like someone releasing a flock of birds. “They’re saying it means the end of the war. But you’ll also be hearing unfounded rumors that the people at Oak Ridge, where the materials for the bomb were made, might be in some radioactive danger. That’s why I hurried up here. To dispel any of those speculations. Because they just ain’t so.”

(“Poor Father McFall,” Nonie used to say. “Whenever he tries to talk like plain folk, all he does is sound condescending.”)

“You mean,” Flora gasped, rubbing her arms like she did during our scary programs, “Helen’s father was making the bomb? That was the secret work?”

“Helping to make, along with thousands of others. Yes, that was the secret work, although they didn’t know. Only the scientists and some highly placed government and Army people were in on the whole picture. The best kept secret in the history of the world, they’re saying. But they’re speculating all kinds of wild things on the radio and calling it news. I wanted to assure you that nobody at Oak Ridge has been harmed by what was being made there and that nobody is in any danger.” He permitted himself a wintry laugh. “Chaplain Dudley said when the news first came through that they had made the biggest bomb in the history of the world, some workers packed up and hightailed it out of there because they were afraid the place might explode any minute.”

“Does this mean my father might be on his way home now?”

“He wouldn’t be one of those, Helen. He’d go right on with his job for the rest of the day. That’s what Chaplain Dudley is going to do. After all, it’s Monday, a workday. They’ll clock in and clock out, maybe celebrate some among themselves after work.” Father McFall shot up a black sleeve and consulted his wristwatch. “Actually, though it’s my day off, I have opened the church and put a sign on the door that we’ll have Evening Prayer at five. Parishioners will want to thank God that this long war is finally going to end. And they may want to pray we won’t misuse this frightening new power we have just unleashed on the world.”

As Flora and I were walking him to his car, we heard the phone. “I’ll get it,” I said. “It’s probably my father.”

“Well, be sure and tell him I was here,” said Father McFall.

But it was Finn. “Have you girls heard the news?”

“About the bomb? Yes, my father helped make it.”

A bump of silence. “Is it a joke with me you’re having?”

“No, it’s true. Father McFall was just here to tell us. He’s been on the phone with someone he knows at Oak Ridge.”

“Holy Mother of God.”

“Of course, my father didn’t know what he was making,” I felt I should add. “Only the scientists and a few top government people knew. It was the best kept secret in the history of the world, Father McFall says.”

“Have you talked to your father?”

“Not yet. He might—he just might—be coming home for my birthday tomorrow, but that’s a secret, too. Not even Flora knows.”

“Where is Flora?”

Flora rushed into the kitchen. “Is that your father? I want to speak to him.”

“No, it’s Finn. But I think he wants to talk to you.”


WE KEPT THE radio on while Flora finished her pantry rearrangement. I was given the job of wiping down each item with a damp dish towel before it was allowed back in, which unfortunately recalled to me the night I had wiped my father’s bloody brow after he had passed out on the kitchen floor. As Father McFall had warned us, there was all kinds of news. Between the national bulletins, some with gory details of what had been done to Hiroshima and its people, local citizens were interviewed and encouraged to express their reactions to the bomb, which was now being called the atomic bomb. Some of these reactions were pretty vindictive about how the Japs had it coming to them, but when some man, or woman, on the street went too far for good taste, the radio person quickly intervened, saying the loss of life was of course deplorable but think of the American lives saved because the war would end quickly now. Flora listened carefully to everything, occasionally uttering yips of pity and horror, whereas I was mainly interested in the mentions of Oak Ridge. I kept expecting to hear my father’s name.

After we had finished the pantry and admired it, Flora turned off the radio and said we needed to go for a walk.

“If I had these weeks to do over,” she said, as we skidded arm in arm down our driveway, “I would do some things differently.”

“What?” I was really curious.

“I would have got you out more.”

“But we couldn’t go anywhere.”

“We could have walked.”

“We have walked.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to the mailbox and back. Real walks. We could have gone on little hikes through the woods. Taken picnics.”

In the mailbox, along with the flighty black ant that seemed to have taken up residence there, was a single pink envelope addressed to me by an adult. Inside a birthday card with a picture of two rabbits hopping off together, Rachel Huff had written in her tortured script: “See you back at school!” My belated thank-you note had achieved its purpose: at least they weren’t my enemies anymore.

“Isn’t that nice of them,” said Flora.

“Mrs. Huff keeps a drawer full of cards for all occasions,” I informed her. “And she has this book with everybody’s address and their birthdays and anniversaries. All she had to do was pick a card, write my address, put on a stamp, and make Rachel write something.”

“Well, it was still thoughtful of them.”

I conceded it was. “Even though my birthday’s not till tomorrow.”

“You have to tell me what kind of cake you want. Did … your grandmother make you some special cake?”

“Please don’t say any more until tomorrow. It might be bad luck.”

“Oh, okay,” said Flora, as though she understood, which she didn’t. She had no idea about the hatpin under the pillow.

“Let’s walk up to the top of Sunset Drive,” she said. “I’ve never been that way.”

“There’s nothing up there but logging roads, but be my guest.”

“I blame myself for not getting you out more,” said Flora. “It’s my own lack of imagination. I didn’t grow up with all this land around me. And yet we walked more in a day in Alabama than you and I have done all summer. We walked to the grocery. Then if we needed something else, we walked there again. And then Daddy started what he called his regime.”

“What’s a regime?”

“He made himself walk a mile every day. The doctor said he was too sedentary, sitting around playing cards so much, and also he was getting fat. So Daddy started walking all the way around the roundhouse between fixing the engines. He worked out it would equal a mile if he walked it twice a day. He got so used to his walk that he went to the roundhouse on his days off and I would go with him. Though we only went around once, which was just half a mile.”

“Are you saying I’m getting fat?”

“Oh no, honey, I wasn’t. I’m talking about him. Oh, poor Daddy. I still catch myself thinking that when I get home he’s going to come out the door and hug me.” A brief spate of tears followed, but by now they were the expected thing, a part of Flora, like her childish feet with the too-friendly toenails. “Today I thought we’d look at that land Mr. Quarles was talking about. Where they cut down all the good trees and left a mess and he wants to build the houses for the GIs. What was it your father called him?”

“The Old Mongrel.”

“What had he done to deserve that?”

“You don’t have to do anything to be a mongrel. You just are one, like a dog without a pedigree.”

“My goodness,” said Flora, with an uneasy laugh, “I guess that must make me one.”





XXVI.


I was glad Finn no longer dressed up before he came to us. He had wet-combed his hair and he must have washed his body after his other deliveries because he didn’t have that smell like the day I rode behind him on the motorcycle. He wore his paratrooper boots, shined, with the pants tucked inside, and he had on that shirt with the eagle patch on the sleeve. He said people had waved to him on the street as though he had been part of what happened today.

“Well, you are part of it,” said Flora. “Just as Helen’s father is part of it.” That was going a bit too far, I thought. My father had been at Oak Ridge making the bomb, whereas Finn, as much as we liked him, had spent the last year in the hospital.

We all three carried in the groceries and Flora put everything where it went.

“I got your baking powder and the vanilla,” Finn told her, “but there wasn’t a block of baking chocolate to be found—”

“Never mind, we’ll think of something tomorrow,” said Flora, hurrying him past that subject. “Helen, why don’t you show Finn our beautiful pantry?”

Flora had her driving lesson. Finn was teaching her to back the Oldsmobile out of the garage, but she kept sideswiping the garbage can until he said, “That’s enough for today, love, we’ll try again tomorrow,” and backed out for her. Then they proceeded with their usual lesson, stopping and starting and reversing and changing gears, round and round the circular drive Finn and I had restored together.

Then Flora put her casserole in the oven and excused herself for a quick bath because she said she was all sweaty. Finn and I were left by ourselves, which was nice, except I was nervous. Not expecting Flora’s bath, I hadn’t prepared anything to say.

“You must be so proud of your father,” said Finn, following me into the living room. “I hope I can meet him someday.”

“You will. He’s coming home in two weeks and four days. Maybe sooner. But I don’t want to think about it till tomorrow.”

“Which is your birthday.” Finn sat down next to me on the sofa and placed a parcel tied with string on the coffee table. “The wartime wrapping you’ll have to excuse. But I hope you like what’s inside.”

It was a handsome wooden box of colored pencils, accompanied by an artist’s drawing pad. “They’re the kind I use, when I can get them,” said Finn, running his fingers lovingly across the pencils in their separate velvet trenches. “Made in Holland. After supper, we’ll try them out.”

I was taken aback when the freshly bathed Flora reappeared in the blue dress I hadn’t seen her wear since Nonie’s funeral. Its cut and drapery suited her better than any of her other clothes, and she had put on her high heels and some makeup. I felt not only upstaged but put at a disadvantage. I was in my same clothes from the morning and hadn’t been given a chance to wash off our day’s activities.

We ate after the six o’clock news with Lowell Thomas. The big-name evening newscasters themselves had been upstaged because by now everyone had heard the shocking highlights earlier in the day. Blast equal to thousand tons of TNT. Most destructive force ever devised by man. Sixty thousand dead and still counting. The entire Japanese Second Army wiped out on their parade ground while doing morning calisthenics.

“I know it’s unpatriotic,” said Flora, “but I can’t stop feeling horrible about all those dead and burned people.”

“It’s not unpatriotic,” Finn corrected her, “it’s human.”

“How will this affect your chances with that Army board?”

“I’ve been wondering myself. It scotches my chances of getting shipped off to fight the Japs and redeeming my war record. But maybe they’ll find a place for me in demobilization. I can sit behind a desk for a year or two and help send others home.”

“What is scotches?” I asked.

“You scotch a wheel with a wedge,” explained Finn, “to keep it from rolling.”

“Oh,” I said, understanding.

“Well, I’m sorry,” said Flora, blushing through her makeup. “But I’m glad your getting shipped off to fight the Japs is scotched.”

“Well, and I’m not sorry that you’re glad,” Finn softly responded.


AFTER SUPPER WE returned to the living room to try out my pencils. There was still plenty of light coming through the west windows. Finn sat next to me and demonstrated how to alter the shade of a color by applying various degrees of pressure. Then he showed how you could blend a red with a yellow to make orange, a blue with a red to make purple, a blue and a yellow to make green, and a red, yellow, and blue to make brown. For these exercises, he used a page from his own sketchbook, which he always carried with him, so I wouldn’t have to mess up my new one.

Flora kept up a steady murmur of accolades as she paced back and forth behind us or perched on the sofa arm on Finn’s side. “This is just so impressive … I can use this with my class at school. Will it work the same with Crayolas?”

“Not exactly,” said Finn. “These are very soft leads. Crayons are mostly wax. But your kids will get the idea.”

Then he said it was time we tried an actual portrait, if Flora would be so good as to sit in the chair and serve as our model.

“Oh no, please,” she protested.

“How will I teach her to draw a portrait, then? Do you see someone else I could ask? Of course, Helen and I could imagine some person besides yourself sitting in the chair, but what if we don’t imagine the same person?”

I thought this was hilarious and it shut Flora up. She took her position obediently in the wing chair and let Finn tell her how he wanted her to arrange herself.

“The first thing I want you to do,” Finn instructed me, “is to fix your eyes on Flora. Then I want you to squint until she gets all blurry and you can see only the shape she makes in the chair.”

“Just her head?”

“No, the whole body. The shape it makes against the chair, but not the chair. Get that shape firmly in your head. The angle of it, where it bears its weight. Now, we’ll take a pencil, this yellow will do, and laying the point sideways on the paper we lightly rub in the shape.” He demonstrated on his own pad, making Flora in her blue dress no more than a yellow bag leaning sideways. “Now you have a go.” He handed over the pencil.

I sat paralyzed over my new drawing pad. “What if I make a mistake and ruin my first page?”

“Will we switch, then?” He handed over his pad with the yellow blob. “But will you care to have my drawing on your first page?”

“I wouldn’t mind.” People would think it was my drawing.

“Well, in that case—” He took back the yellow pencil and duplicated the blob in my pad. “There. Now we each have our shape to work with. And inside this shape is a person. Unlike any other person in the world.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Flora with a nervous titter.

Finn gave Flora one of his sweet, accepting looks. He probably looked at Miss Adelaide that way when she remembered one more thing she’d forgotten. “Now,” he said, handing me a blue pencil and taking a darker blue for himself, “we’ll start at the top with the hair on the head, but here, again, we’re after a shape, not a hairstyle. How the cloud of dark sits on the face below … I know, I know, we haven’t done the face yet, but the whole thing’s a package, don’t you see, you’ve got to keep this whole package of a person in your mind, seeing how one thing flows out of another, an arm out of a shoulder, the curve of the body that allows the hand to rest so naturally on the thigh of the crossed leg. The mistake most beginners make is they draw each thing separate and then nothing connects. But we’ve put down our yellow shape to guide us, so we won’t make that mistake.”

“This isn’t working,” I said, after a minute. “Yours already looks like her hair but mine doesn’t.”

“Yours looks fine. Leave it for now and find the curve of the neck in your shape and sketch it in. Great, that’s great. Now we come round the shoulder and round out the arm, and then, er, there’s this fullness” (he was doing Flora’s breast—or bust she would call it) “and notice the shadows it makes against the inside of the arm …”

We continued on like this until a likeness of Flora, the real essence of her presence in the chair, emerged under Finn’s hand.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I make the same marks you do, but mine look different.”

“It’s looking at the model you’re meant to be doing, not at my ‘marks,’” Finn scolded with an affectionate nudge of his arm against mine. “Yours is coming along, wait and see. You must have faith in yourself.”

“That’s exactly what Mrs. Anstruther would have said!” exclaimed Flora from Nonie’s chair.

“Shush,” I said. “You’re the model.”

My body shape, or rather Flora’s as I had drawn it, wasn’t hopeless. Finn’s instructions had protected it from beginner’s anatomical naïveté. But when he finally let us fill in the face, I got something wrong and spoiled the whole picture. What made it worse was that I couldn’t locate what I had done wrong. I was furious with myself. I had suppressed a childish giggle while we had been working on Flora’s “bust,” but what if I failed to suppress my childish tears of frustration?

“Honey, I think you’re getting tired,” said Flora.

“You shut up.”

“Ah, now,” Finn sorrowfully chided. “What is it that’s made you cross?”

“I ruined the face.” Now a tear escaped. To keep from doing a complete Flora, I silently strung together the filthiest words I knew.

Finn lifted up a layer of the pencil box and extracted something. “Do you see this? It’s called an eraser.”

“Erasers smudge.”

“Not this eraser. It’s made to go with these pencils. There’s also a wee sharpener under here, for when you’ll be needing it for the pencils. Now, how did you ruin the face?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, start at the top. Is it the forehead? The eyes?”

“The eyes, I think.”

“What about them? Don’t be looking at my marks, look at the model.”

“Hers are further apart.”

“Right! Those far-apart eyes are one of her most beguiling features. So, let’s fix them.”

Flora had turned on the lamps before it was time for the 7:45 news we sometimes listened to. I was not sorry to see the summer light fading earlier. It meant school would be starting and my father would be home and Flora would be back in Alabama. H. V. Kaltenborn, or Hans von Kaltenborn, as Nonie liked to call him, had no new horror stories from Japan to offer, but he pointed out in his ominous, rat-a-tat diction that, for all we knew, we had created a Frankenstein’s monster, and with the passage of a little time an enemy might improve it and use it against us.

“If it’s all right with everybody, I’m going to switch to some music,” said Flora.

“That is a lovely dress,” Finn said as she swished past him to the console radio in her high heels. “Doing your portrait, I was thinking there ought to be a special name for its color. Darker than cobalt and purpler than Prussian: ‘twilight blue,’ perhaps.”

If it had been just the two of us she would be barefooted by now. And of course would not be in the “twilight blue” dress.

“Juliet Parker made it for me,” Flora said, finding a dance music station. “She bought the material for herself, but then when Mrs. Anstruther died she wanted me to have something nice for the funeral.”

“I’d like to meet your Juliet Parker,” Finn said.

“Well, who knows? Maybe you will,” said Flora gaily, tapping him on the head as she passed behind the sofa. “I’m going to make us some coffee.”

“Major Glenn Miller,” said Finn, nodding at the radio. “Another irreplaceable mortal whose plane went down.” He shook his head sadly, then sprang to his feet and held out his arms. “Let’s dance, Helen.”

“I don’t dance very well yet.”

“Well, here’s a chance to shorten that ‘yet.’”

“Really, I can’t—”

“Ah, I know what you’re capable of when you say really you can’t. I’ve seen it, remember? I’ve seen you jump into the unknown.”

“Shush,” I said, frowning toward the kitchen as I let him pull me up, like that day he pulled me out of my stupor from the side of the road.

“I know, I know. It’s our secret.”

Annie Rickets and I had devised our own frantic version of jitterbugging, and last summer Mrs. Beale had found some hard-up old couple who had once run an Arthur Murray studio to teach Brian and me (poor Brian) the basic ballroom steps. But with Finn’s palm warm and solid at your back and him guiding you with your joined hands, your movements were in his custody. It was a world apart from two separate bodies striving to “dance.”

“You see?” he crooned as we spun around the threadbare carpet.

“If I was taller I could reach you better.”

“Don’t be in such a rush, darling. I didn’t get my full height till I was seventeen.”

“Don’t stop on account of me,” cried Flora, returning with the tray. “You two look great.” In typical Flora flutter she set everything out on the coffee table. On a plate covered with one of my prewar birthday napkins (sailboats, age six) she had interlaced Fig Newtons with the leftover pound cake, which wouldn’t have been enough by itself. Then with a stagy sigh of contentment, she tucked herself neatly into a corner of the sofa, and made a big show of studying the two portraits of herself in the drawing pads. “Never in my life have I been made such a fuss over. And, you know, I love them both. Each of them shows me a new side of myself.”

As in his earlier drawing, Finn had made her prettier than she was; but what new side of herself had mine revealed to her?

Then Finn commented, as he had once before, that you got to know a person by drawing them. “And sometimes while drawing someone”—he addressed Flora, speaking above the music—“you discover things about yourself in relation to that person.”

“Like what?” Flora was all eagerness.

“Like feelings.” He spoke over my head as he maneuvered me about on the carpet. “Feelings you didn’t know you had about that person.”

Each new time Finn spun me around while continuing to talk to Flora above the music, a certain object began to annoy me. I became vexed, then indignant, then enraged, by the eight-ounce glass of milk set down so emphatically among the cozy coffee things.

The music stopped for a commercial break. “You are going to be a fine dancer,” Finn said, releasing me. “Helen doesn’t know her own powers,” he remarked to Flora.

“You don’t have to tell me that,” said Flora, now busily pouring coffee into the two cups. “I was saying to her only the other day ‘I feel I should pay your father tuition for all the things I’ve learned from you this summer.’”

“It wasn’t the other day, it was this morning,” I corrected. “And you didn’t say you learned them from me, you just said learned.” It suddenly occurred to me that both of them were patronizing me, making me feel important so they could say things to each other over my head.

“You’re right, honey, it was this morning,” Flora instantly capitulated. “My, what a full day it’s been. So many things happening in one day.” She tucked her twilight blue skirt closer to her body, indicating Finn should sit next to her. “Come have your coffee while it’s hot.”

“Did anyone hear me say I wanted milk?” I asked, still standing in the middle of the carpet where Finn had left me.

“Well, no, but you always have a glass at”—she swerved wildly, just avoiding the bedtime word—“the end of the day.”

“Yes, but tonight I want to celebrate my father.” I walked over to the sideboard, and opened the center cabinet, which smelled musty from staying closed all summer. Out came the cognac bottle and the fluted crystal aperitif glass Nonie always used for her nightcaps. I sloshed the glass full, raised it to the orange sky outside the western window, and before Flora could react I drank it down.

“Oh, honey, no—” she said with an intake of a breath, like someone begging a person not to jump off a high building. Except that I had already jumped.

I poured a second glass and raised it to the pair on the sofa. “I’d like to drink to my father for helping make the bomb,” I said.

Finn was the first to collect himself. “Hear, hear,” he said, raising his coffee cup before he’d even put in the cream. “To Helen’s father.”

“To Helen’s father,” Flora barely whispered, raising her cup.

We all three drank. I would have liked to drain the second glass, but my nose and chest were still on fire from the first. I managed a respectable gulp, and then said, in a somewhat shaky voice, “I think I’ll sip the rest of my nightcap in my room.”

“Don’t you think that’s enough, honey?” Flora half-rose to take the glass away from me, but I cut her short.

“Good night, Finn. Thank you very much for the pencils and the art lesson. No, please, don’t get up. Good night, Flora. Thank you for dinner and all the things you did for me today.”

“Would you like for us to come and tell you good night after a while?” Flora asked, sounding defeated.

“No, thank you. I’m really very tired.”


HERE I WAS again on the upholstered bench that fitted into the alcove of Nonie’s dressing table. Hardly past infancy, I had begun clambering up this bench and flailing my little legs until I achieved a sitting position in front of the three-way mirror. In the long mirror was myself as a whole child, from curly top to socks and shoes. The mirrors on either side were shorter because they only started above the drawers where Nonie kept her grooming items. They gave you what was called your profile. You could never see your own profile except in mirrors like these. People had preferences about their profiles. A movie star would tell the cameraman, “Shoot my left profile, it’s better.” And if you adjusted the side mirrors, pulled them closer around you like a wrap, you could see more reflections from more angles, even the way you looked from the back. But who would want to see any more Helens? Certainly not the pair I had left behind in the living room. Not Brian, not the Huffs (despite the birthday card), certainly not Annie Rickets (“You’ve got a few more months of people feeling sorry for you. But after that, you’d better take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror.”). Not Father McFall, not my father, and sometimes not Nonie (“I’m going to pick up Helen from school and take her to the movies so my son can have a quiet house.”). Even for Mrs. Jones, one of me was probably sufficient.

Okay, Annie, I’m here, taking that good, long look you recommended. I’m not going to ask you what you would see if you were standing behind me—the way I was not standing behind Nonie that day she was trying on the Easter hat. In fact, I’m not going to think your thoughts, at all. I can imagine only too well the kinds of things you would say about what just happened in our living room. No, shut up, I said I wasn’t going to think about it. This is just between me and me. Helen in the looking glass assessing Helen on the bench.

Now she’s picking up the glass, which is dusty, and swallowing more cognac and making a face. How could Nonie enjoy this stuff? Wine I could see: like all sophisticated children, I had been allowed wine mixed with water on special occasions. But this was like swallowing pepper. It made you shudder all the way down. Nonie said it stimulated your heart more than wine.

Maybe I would grow up to have a faulty heart. I might have one already. (“Her little heart just stopped. Barely four months after her grandmother died, she was found dead. Found dead on her birthday in the grandmother’s bed. It was the cleaning woman who discovered her. The person who had been staying with her for the summer thought she was just sleeping late. ‘There was too much excitement the day before. I mean, with her father and the bomb and all. She’d had a long day and was a little cross by the end of it, but I never suspected there was anything wrong. I ought to have checked on her, but she said she was very tired and didn’t want to say good night and closed her door. Now I will never forgive myself. I just wasn’t up to the task. I failed her father and I failed her.’”)

Beyond my closed door, the dance music went on. They could be dancing now. The firm palm of Finn bracing her back, the twilight blue dress swishing all over his legs. (“You are so good to her, Finn. You will make a wonderful father someday. But, did you see the way she tossed back that brandy? Her father would kill me if he knew. Of course, he doesn’t set a very good example himself. She’s such a moody child. Smart, but so moody. There have been times when I thought we were doing real well, and then there have been other times when I’m counting the days and the hours and the minutes until I can say good-bye forever to this strange old house.”)

I stood up and pushed away the bench and pondered my full length in the long mirror. A girl in a shapeless blouse and skirt and socks and loafers because her nice dress no longer fit. I would need new clothes for school and who would be there to say, “Now that’s smart”? I was not tall enough to drape a hand over my dancing partner’s shoulder, but Finn said he hadn’t gotten his full height until seventeen. “Hair the color of wheat” sounded just like Flora: “And over here Juliet Parker has planted us a little field of wheat.” I preferred “tawny,” or “dark blond.” According to Finn, all my features were the right distance from each other, which Flora said meant better than pretty. But Finn had also praised Flora’s far-apart eyes. Flora said my looks would improve if I would look happier to see people when they came into a room. I smiled at myself in the mirror and the image responded with a simpering grimace. If you were really happy to see someone come into a room, you wouldn’t necessarily smile. I had seen people not smile who were glad to see me. Brian didn’t smile, he just looked as though something that belonged to him had reappeared. Nonie wasn’t a natural smiler, either. When she was really appreciating something I’d said or done, she looked like someone looks when they have been proved right.

(“She’s a little girl who’s had a lousy summer,” Finn might be saying as he danced Flora round the threadbare carpet. “Seeing nobody but us, one friend getting polio, the other moving away, and the third one you say she doesn’t like so well. And it’s her first summer without her grandmother. She’s entitled to a few moods. And didn’t she thank me sweetly for the pencils, and you for all the things you did for her today?”)

I gulped another swig from the aperitif glass and kept my mirror face from registering the cognac’s ravaging passage down my gullet. I practiced looking like a person happy to see someone without needing to force a simpery smile. There. You did have some control over how you appeared to others.

A welcome new feeling of invulnerability lit up my insides and I decided to be generous on the eve of my eleventh birthday and go back and say good night like the kind of person people would want to see more of.




THEY WERE NOT dancing to the music as I had permitted them to do in my thoughts, and they were not on the sofa where I had left them. The tray and the coffee things were gone from the coffee table, but the glass of milk remained. The plate underneath had been removed, but two Fig Newtons and a shard of pound cake huddled together on the sailboat napkin from my sixth birthday. Flora was obviously planning to pay a bedtime visit against my wishes. Our two sketch pads, Finn’s and mine, lay at one end of the sofa, both opened to the Flora portraits. Maybe Finn had gone already, but why had I not heard the motorcycle?

I crossed the carpeted dining room and was about to enter the kitchen when a muffled sound made me stealthy. Flora and Finn were locked in an embrace by the sink. This was no movie kiss. Their mouths mashed together as though each was trying desperately to disappear down the other’s throat. I fled, stopping briefly by the coffee table long enough to pour the glass of milk over the two portraits of Flora and the unguilty sofa cushion that happened to be lying beneath.