Flora A Novel

XXVII.


How was it that I was magically skimming our treacherous driveway in the almost-dark without a single stumble? And in my leather-soled loafers, not my rubber-gripping Keds. (Was I doomed for the rest of my life to think of Mrs. Huff every time I thought of Keds?)

I felt weightless and glowing with the power of revenge. Was it the cognac or was it the hilarious replay of myself dumping the milk—or was it both? Just beneath the hilarious replay crept a curdling flow of loss and shame. I needed to outrun this flow until it had hardened solid and could no longer suck me into it.

Sunset Drive was already in darkness, but the tops of the trees, raucous with insect life, made black cutout designs against a greenish metallic sky. What color would Finn give it, or did his “special names” apply only to dresses?

The last time I had walked down Sunset Drive by myself had been at midday in early summer. Flora’s clothes had just arrived and I was fleeing her Alabama talk and her insulting notion that I had undergone “a strange childhood.” On this midday walk I had hoped to get some of myself back only to find it slipping away with every step I took. At this first bend in the road, I had looked through a veil and seen Sunset Drive going on just the same without me. And then had come the awful draining away and the loss of words to account for what was happening to me. That’s when Nonie’s voice had told me to sit down on the ground in the shade and let everything go.

“Don’t children have little imaginary friends?” Flora had wanted to know, ironing her Alabama clothes and telling that story I would rather not have heard about a certain skirt. When I said I was going for a walk, she asked should she come, and I said no, I was going out to look for an imaginary friend.

And then someone’s boots creaked and someone’s armpits smelled and I was brought back from nothingness by someone saying, “Hello, hello? Is anyone there?”

Together we scuffed downhill so I could show him my grandfather’s shortcut. I pointed out the streetlight at the hairpin curve that “ruffians came all the way across town to shoot out,” and he delighted me by falling into the same trap I had fallen in when Nonie explained about the ruffians. “Why didn’t they shoot out the streetlights on their own side of town?” he wanted to know. “Because,” I crowed triumphantly, “they already have.”

The ruffians had been here again—no streetlight illuminated the hairpin curve tonight. But my eyes had grown used to the darkness, and I could make out the entrance to my grandfather’s overgrown path that followed the broken-down railing until it dipped out of sight into the crater. (“Ah, I know what you’re capable of … I’ve seen you jump into the unknown. … I know, I know. It’s our secret.”)

Branches slapped and brambles clawed as I felt my way through the indistinct undergrowth, no yipping Flora following close behind at noontime, no fast-moving paratrooper crashing ahead in daylight. I hoped, vaguely, to be hurt. Not killed, or crippled like Brian, or even to have my face scarred for life with slashes, but just damaged in some way that would make people sorry I’d had to go through this night and equally amazed that I had come out of it as well as I had.

I tripped and went down. Reaching out with my hands, I groped emptiness just ahead of where I had fallen. I was at the edge of the crater! I had almost gone over! But no, it was just a deep rut, like the bad one on our driveway the garbageman and the towing man had covered with a piece of board. Nevertheless, I decided to crawl the rest of the way to the crater on my hands and knees. My plan was to let myself carefully down its side, holding on to the sassafras tree the way I had been taught. And then what? To be found curled at the bottom, exposed to the night? But it would be harder to freeze to death in August than in November, when he had done it, and I had no intention of taking off my clothes and being found naked.

I scraped my knee badly while edging backward down the slope, and paused to reassess my strategy when I finally gained hold of the sassafras tree. Crouching at its base, I indulgently dabbled in the blood running down my leg. When it kept coming, I wiped some of it on my face and licked its metallic flavor off my fingertips.

Had they discovered the damage back at the house yet? (Flora: “Oh! What happened here?” “Well, I think some milk was spilled,” Finn would say matter-of-factly, noting the empty glass. “But—oh dear, the sketch pads! Both of them ruined. Maybe we can save them. Not my portraits, what do those matter, but maybe the pads aren’t completely soaked through. What do you think happened?” “I think someone was angry.” “But why would she—? Oh, no! You don’t think she saw—Oh dear, look at the sofa! Her father is going to kill me.” “Leave it, love. Why don’t you go and check on her?”)

How long would it take for them to figure out what to do? (“She’s not in her room, and the door is wide open.” “Where would she most likely go?” “Well, maybe the garage. She often sits in the Oldsmobile when she’s moping.”)

Not in the garage. Not in the Oldsmobile, “moping.” What next? Search the rooms of the house? (“Would she have run away?” “She never has before. Oh, dear, I’m sure she must have seen us in the kitchen, but how? She had gone to her room, she had said good night.”

“People,” Finn would reason patiently, “have been known to come out of their rooms after they have said good night and gone into them.”)

If she wasn’t in the car and wasn’t in the house, where would she have gone? The gift of tears would surely have kicked in by now, and Finn would have to perform some manly comforting while organizing what to do next. “I want you to stay here at the house, in case she shows up. I’ll do a bit of reconnaissance work outside.” “Will you take the motorcycle? Or since it’s an emergency I’m sure her father wouldn’t mind if you took the car—” “No, reconnaissance is best done on foot. Now, I want you to stay here, is that agreed?”)

I slouched down at the base of the sassafras tree and rested my feet on the bumpy root below. If someone were to come after me soon, they wouldn’t have to descend all the way into the crater. Or, if I thought it best, I could always scramble down at the last minute, though it wouldn’t be so easy in the dark and with no one to catch me. But for now I would wait here and count how many nature noises I could identify. Cicadas, tree frogs, rustlings of larger bodies on the ground that I didn’t want to think about right now. Mrs. Jones said when you heard your first cicadas it was just six weeks till the first frost, and they had been going strong for days now. Starling Peake had kept a tree frog in his room for a whole winter; it lived in a fern pot and liked to come out in the daytime and cling to the top of an upholstered chair with its little sucker feet. (“There was something adorably boyish about Starling, even though he let us down badly.”) I had been planning to tell this anecdote to the next inhabitant of Starling’s room, after I had finished with the more important stories of the house.

Distant gunfire exploded from below. Then I realized they were shooting off fireworks in town. To celebrate the bomb, of course. Would my father be a local hero? “There goes Harry Anstruther, he helped make the secret bomb that finally ended the war.” I wasn’t clear whether Oak Ridge would be someplace people would keep working at, now that its purpose had been accomplished. Just as well if it closed down. I loved my father, but he had sounded tempted by the prospect of staying on there, and I knew without ever seeing it that I would hate living there in a little house and going to school like a child on a reservation. Maybe they would send him home with a bonus: big enough so we could fix up Old One Thousand. If he came tomorrow for my birthday he would be surprised by the repaired gutters and our reopening of the circular driveway around the house. If only things hadn’t turned out the way they had tonight. But whose fault was that? I was the one who had been ambushed by the unimaginable. How could people be so double-dealing?

Officially, my birthday wasn’t until late tomorrow. I had “finally decided to make my entrance” at six fifteen in the evening, according to Nonie. The time was recorded by her in blue ink in my baby book.

“Was she very tired when I finally came out?” I always wanted to know.

“You are always tired when you finish having a baby,” Nonie said, “but I would say she was more relieved than anything else.”

“Why?”

“She had been working hard to make you come out for eighteen hours. That’s a long time. But between her contractions she could be quite droll. ‘Honora, I’ve just had an awful thought,’ she said. ‘What if he decides he’d rather not come out?’ ‘Then,’ I said, ‘we’ll have to think of something really special to bribe him with.’ This made her laugh.”

“But where was my father?”

“He was waiting at a proper distance to be informed. I was the one who saw her through. Early on, the nurse came in and said, ‘Mrs. Anstruther, what, pray tell, are you doing in the bed with Mrs. Anstruther?’ ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I said. ‘I am lying beside her, sharing her labor pains.’”

I liked this story except for one thing. “Why did she have to call me a he?”

“Oh, darling, that’s nothing. It’s just gender shorthand for babies who haven’t been born yet. It’s the same as when people refer to ‘the history of man,’ or ‘mankind.’ She knew you were you, all along.”

The fireworks had stopped. Had they run out or gone to get some more? I thought of Mrs. Jones waiting for the pretty fireworks Rosemary liked best and then saying “Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten,” even though people looked at her funny.

What if nobody came after me? Would I have to stay here until my father started searching tomorrow? And if nobody was going to come, what was the point in spending the night with my bottom getting damp from the ground and goose bumps on my arms and tree bark digging into my shoulders? Maybe I should drag myself back through the undergrowth and walk down Sunset Drive to the village. I would be just as hard to find if I spent the night in the church, which Father McFall was leaving open for people who wanted to thank God or be sorry about the bomb.

Something horrible with a huge wingspan passed directly over my head and I was back in the nightmare where Nonie flew through the air and shrieked before breaking apart at the bottom of the crater, one dismembered leg twisted sideways in its old-lady shoe. Only this time I was the one who shrieked. Why was life so treacherous and unfair? It was enough to make you want to stop being in it.

A circle of light jittered back and forth across the treetops. “Helen? Is that you?”

Don’t answer. Give the false-hearted more time to imagine the world without you in it.

Louder: “Helen!”

The tree frogs abruptly ceased their night chorus. The bouncing circles of light grew larger. “Are ye in there? I’m sure I heard you.”

Now my own mind was double-dealing me: Had I known all along he was going to come, like the soldier who finally wins the princess out of the coffin before she can destroy any more men? Or had he come too late for it to count?

The light played back and forth over the floor of the crater. “Will I find you down there?” he called. “Or are you wanting me to jump so you’ll have time to hide somewhere else?”

“I’m not hiding, stupid,” I said in my normal voice. “I hurt my leg climbing down.”

“Ah, the Sphinx speaks. Is it bad, the leg?”

“It’s stopped bleeding, but I’m resting it awhile.”

“Good idea. Where are you resting?”

“At that sassafras tree.”

The light skittered about until it found my face. “Ah.” The voice could not conceal its relief. “Will I come down?”

“Suit yourself.”

The light shut off. There were no footsteps, just the rustling dark, and then he swung down and was sitting beside me.

“How did you do that?” I said. “I didn’t hear you coming.”

“Didn’t I spend two years training to outsmart my enemy in the dark?”

“Am I your enemy now?”

“Let’s have a look at the injury.” He played the flashlight, which I recognized from our hardware drawer, on my legs. “Which one is it?”

“The one with the blood on it.” I stopped myself from adding “silly.”

“Hmm. Can you walk on it, or will I have to carry you home?” I caught something less than playful in his tone.

“It’s more of a cut than anything else. I’d prefer to walk.”

“Up you go, then. And no, you’re not my enemy, but just imagine yourself handcuffed to me as my prisoner of war till I get you home.”

He lugged me up the side of the crater and then towed me ungallantly along behind him. What a disaster this place was after dark. It was hardly possible to imagine my father and Willow Fanning running away at night, even though it hadn’t been such an obstacle course back then. How naïve of Flora to have thought we could “repair” such a jungle as a “surprise” for my father at the end of the summer.

“Do you have to go so fast?” I cried. “You’re hurting my wrist.”

“Sorry,” he said, stopping to let me catch my breath but not letting go of my wrist. “It’s only that I want to get you home. The poor girl is beside herself with worry. She takes it mortally seriously, you know, being left in charge of you, and now she’s terrified she’s let your father down. I had a feeling you might come here, but she thought you could have gone back to that place you walked to. That land on top of the hill that old Mr. Quarles wants to buy.”

“Why on earth would I want to go back there? The loggers have ruined it. That’s why he wants to buy it, he loves making a profit on other people’s losses.”

“Well, you weren’t there to tell us that, were you? She said you seemed to have enjoyed the walk, so we tried that first.”

“Enjoyed! How stupid can you get?”

“A pity, isn’t it, how stupid we all are.”

“I didn’t mean you. But Flora’s simpleminded, you must have realized that by now.”

“I must be simpleminded myself because no, I hadn’t. I think you are confusing simpleminded with simple-hearted.”

“I’m not sure I know what ‘simple-hearted’ means,” I said haughtily.

“When there’s no deceit or malice in your heart. Most of us have some; it protects us. People without it are rare. My friend Barney came close, but he’d built up a layer of sludge to protect his heart against his mother. That’s why Flora is so rare, it’s just her heart she offers, with none of the sludge to wade through.”

“You sound like you love her,” I remarked scornfully, but his answer, if he gave one, was drowned out by a shriek of braking tires, headlamps dancing crazily toward us, as though someone thought it might be fun to drive into the woods and run us down, then veering off wildly at the last minute to hit something else up ahead with a crack and crush of metal.

“God in Heaven,” said Finn, letting go of my hand.

“It’s because they shot out the streetlight again,” I said, feeling a surge of excitement accompanied by shameful relief. An accident would surely wipe my misconduct from Finn’s memory of this night. “Will we go and help out?” I was starting to talk like him.

“From the sound of things, we need to get an ambulance. You’re going to run up that hill as fast as you can and tell Flora to phone. She’s waiting at the house in case you come back. Tell them exactly where, on Sunset Drive.”

“But I want to help you.”

“Who’ll go and call for the ambulance, then? Who is being simpleminded now?”

“But shouldn’t we go and look first? We don’t even know how badly—”

“Christ almighty, Helen, is it your morbid curiosity we must satisfy before we get help?”

“I need to see!” I screamed. “It might be my father. He’s coming for my birthday! What if he decided to come tonight? You can’t keep me from my father.”

I was already running ahead of him toward the trees broken by the crash. Finn had hurt and insulted me, and I had screamed what I did in order to punish him and win my point, but when I got closer to the wreck it seemed that I had wreaked a hideous magic. The crumpled, steaming car, whose innocent headlights still beamed reliably ahead into the woods, was my father’s Chevy coupe and the numbers on the license plate were the ones I knew by heart.





XXVIII.


Annie Rickets’s claim that her parents were privy to secret information because they worked for the telephone company was not a total fabrication.

My grandfather had installed one of the earliest phone lines in town for Anstruther’s Lodge, and our three-digit number had remained the same, though most people had five-digit numbers by this time. In 1945, you still took the receiver off the hook and an operator, often one whose voice you’d heard before, said, “Number, please.” You said the number—Annie’s was 34598—and the operator said, “Thank you” or “I’ll connect you” (and sometimes both) and she would plug you into the right hole on her switchboard and the number you wanted would ring. If someone didn’t pick up after a certain number of rings, the operator would say, “I’m sorry, but your party doesn’t answer, will you try again later?” Annie’s family was on a party line, and sometimes when we were talking a petulant woman’s voice would break in with “Are you little chatterboxes ever going to get off?” “Oh, dry up, you old bag,” Annie once shot back, and the party complained to the operator, who told Annie’s parents. They made her phone the old bag and apologize. Until the dial system came in, the voice of the operator was an integral part of all telephone intercourse. Talking to callers, the operator could learn about things that were happening and make further calls on her own and thus contribute to the outcome of events.

In an emergency, it was enough to tell the operator what it was and she would plug you into the proper service, or you could just tell her what was the matter and she would contact the service and relay your message.

I had been preparing my message as I ran uphill, a stitch in my side: Operator, you’ve got to help me, my father’s had a bad wreck on Sunset Drive and we need an ambulance quick. She connected me and stayed on the line while the hospital took down the information. Hairpin curve, near the top. Thrown through the windshield. The person with him said a severed artery in the neck.

The ambulance was on its way, but the operator kept talking to me until I told her I really had to go. How old was I? Was there anyone with me? I told her I was eleven and that my father had been one of the people at Oak Ridge helping make the bomb, only we hadn’t known what he was doing, he himself hadn’t known, it was so secret. He had been driving home to be with me on my birthday tomorrow.

Where was Flora? I had yelled for her as I ran into the house. She must have gone out looking for me some more. I was glad she hadn’t been there to make the phone call. She would have included who knew what unnecessary digressions.

(“For God’s sake—run!” croaked a bare-chested Finn, spotlit by the faithful headlights that hadn’t seemed to register that the rest of the car was smashed. I had left him kneeling over my father’s crumpled form, stuffing his own shirt, already blood-soaked, against the side of my father’s neck. “And stay in the house with Flora. You’re under orders!”)

Quickly I circled the downstairs—no Flora, though at some point she had found time to work on the milk damage. Wet kitchen towels had been carefully laid across the sofa cushion, and the assaulted sketch pads placed facedown on a dry towel. I stopped by my room long enough to change into my Keds, which were better for running up and down hills, and then galloped upstairs to check out all the rooms so I could truthfully say I’d looked everywhere. If someone wasn’t in the house, you could hardly be under orders to stay in it with them.

There were two hospitals in town, St. Benedict’s on the south side, and Mission on our side. Mission was only twelve blocks from the entrance to Sunset Drive, and as I skidded down our driveway—this descent less effortless than the one when the cognac was fresher—I could already hear the approaching ambulance.

My father could not die because Finn had been on the spot to save him. And why had he been on the spot? Because he had been out looking for me. My mind raced ahead, binding up the wounds and preparing a desirable outcome. I had worried that my father would find fault with Finn, but how could you find fault with the person who had saved your life? They would become fast friends, the Starling Peake room would be the Devlin Patrick Finn room, Finn would help repair Old One Thousand and drive me to school and attend the local junior college. Even if he didn’t get his status revised and be eligible for the GI Bill, my father would pay the tuition. If only there was more money! But we would manage somehow. In five years, when I turned sixteen, I’d have my driver’s license and could get an after-school job.

When I rounded the first curve I saw the parked ambulance below with its front spotlight trained on the woods. There was a police car, as well, and a fire truck was just arriving. Men tumbled out of vehicles and shouted back and forth and carried handheld searchlights toward the spot where my father lay. From my invisible vantage point above the activity, I seemed to split in half. One half could not suppress the thrill of elation rising in my throat at the enthralling spectacle of human beings organizing themselves to save a life, while the other recoiled from the possibility that my father might die, or indeed was already dead, and that my life would be completely changed.

Now they were carrying him out of the woods. Bare-chested Finn, holding one of the searchlights, followed, directing the high-powered beam on them loading the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. Unable to make out whether they had covered up my father’s face (which I knew from the movies was a bad sign), I edged closer. Still invisible in the dark on the other side of the road, I risked another couple of yards until I could make sure that I really did see the oxygen mask over the face and white wrappings around the neck.

Now that they were getting ready to close the doors, I felt it would be all right to declare myself. Finn couldn’t begrudge me speaking to the men who were carrying away my own father.

I stepped forward to cross to their side of the road, tripped over something substantial, and fell down with a cry. Now the light was on me as I picked myself up from the pavement.

“Another one!” a man cried as the light moved away from my face and shone on the crumpled body of a woman in a blue dress.





XXIX.


“I let you sleep as long as you could,” Mrs. Jones said, opening the blinds in Nonie’s room to let in the bright, sunny day.

“What time is it?”

“Almost ten.”

“Where is Finn?”

“He left last night. After I came. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, but tell me again.”

“Well, he phoned and said for me to come—you’d said where to find my number—and I got here as quick as I could. You were here on the bed, with the blanket over you. He said you had refused to get undressed in case you were needed. Do you remember me helping you get into your pajamas and washing your face?”

“Why did it need washing?”

“There was dried blood on it. He said something about you hurting your knee, and I cleaned it off, too. How are you feeling?”

“My head hurts. I want you to tell me where everyone is.”

Mrs. Jones pulled over Nonie’s dressing table bench and sat down close to me. She was not the sort of person to plop down on your bed. The stoic slabs of her cheeks lay calm and flat against her bones. Her gray gaze was direct without being probing or judging. “Your father is in the hospital. The preacher from your church is with him and will be coming to tell you how he is. Mr. Finn has seen your father, too.”

“Where is Finn now?”

“There’s arrangements have to be made. Mr. Finn is tending to those.”

“What kind of arrangements?”

“Well, he had to get in touch with her people. And fix up things with the railroad to get her home. Oh dear, I never did know what to call her.”

“You mean get her body home.”

“That’s what I mean. Would you like me to bring you something or would you rather go to the kitchen?”

“Thank you, I’m not hungry.”

“I squeezed lemon juice all around those spill marks on the sofa cushion and put it out in the sun. What was spilled on it?”

“I spilled some milk.”

“Well, it ought to dry up fine, then. The drawing books didn’t fare as well, but you can still see the pictures. One of them of her is real good, it’s a pity it got spoiled.”

“What time is Father McFall coming?”

“Right after the hospital, he said.”

“I better get dressed.”

“I’ll be in the kitchen,” said Mrs. Jones.

Beryl Jones, Nonie said, was one to answer your questions or carry out instructions “and stop right there. She doesn’t elaborate, argue, or say what she would do. Would there were more like her!”

You could trust Mrs. Jones to give you her candid responses and respectfully desist from opinions, whereas Father McFall was not one to hold back when he thought you were in error, which is why I thought it safest to be fully dressed and on my guard to receive whatever he deemed me ready for.

But when he arrived, he didn’t treat me as sternly as I had anticipated. Taking my hands in his, he asked almost humbly, “Helen, how can I serve you? Tell me what I can do.” For the first time I noticed how the dry, wrinkled folds of his neck hung down like an old dog’s over his clerical collar. Though it was the kind of thing you expected to hear from waiters or gas station attendants, his choice of words for the occasion completely disarmed me.

“I n-need,” I began. Then harsh, barking sobs burst out of me and I had to wait for them to run their course. “Nobody will tell me anything,” I began again, “and I need to know.”

“What do you need to know, Helen?”

“Is my father going to die?”

“He’s pretty banged up and there are some problems, but thanks to that young soldier’s quick thinking, he’s not going to die.”

“What did Finn do?”

“He packed his shirt against the ruptured artery and then he stood on top of it with his heavy boot till the ambulance came.”

“Can I go and see my father?”

“Not just yet, but I’ll come and see you every day, maybe twice a day, and bring you reports. Why don’t we go in the living room and sit down?”

“Not the living room!”

“Here in the kitchen, then.”

“No, not here, either.”

“Well, where would you like to go?”

“Let’s go out of the house.”

But when we got outside I couldn’t think where we should go. My mind had lost its power of decision. Father McFall seemed to understand this and started walking slowly around the circular drive that Finn and I had cleared. I followed along beside him. It was going to be a warm day. I had not forgotten it was my birthday, but thought it would sound crass to bring it up.

Presently he asked, “Is there anything else you want to know, Helen?”

“Where is she now?”

“At the funeral home.”

“Was she dead when I fell over her, or did she die at the hospital? Finn made me go back home when the second ambulance was coming.”

“It appears to have been instant. She was hit by a car.”

“Was it my father’s car?”

“We think so, but he’s in no condition to be asked yet.”

“What was she doing out in the middle of the dark road?”

“Finn said that, as far as he could tell, she had walked down to see if he had found you yet.”

Finn did not come that day. In the middle of the afternoon, Mrs. Jones said she had to drive into town for a few things. She returned with some groceries and a bakery cake with HELEN written on it in pink and eleven candles waiting to be lit. We had beef stew for dinner and then afterward the cake. The icing wasn’t chocolate, but of course I didn’t say anything. “Rosemary always loved a bakery cake,” Mrs. Jones said, apologetically adding, “though maybe it was because I was no great shakes at baking.” The stew was filling, though without the benefit of Juliet Parker’s famous herbs.

“Will you be spending the night again?” I asked her.

“I’ll be staying with you until we get things figured out. For now, I’m in your old room, I hope that’s all right. When your father comes home, he’ll have to be down here for a while.”

She had a present for me. Its plain brown wrappings reminded me of Finn’s present the evening before, when Flora had gone to take her bath and change into the blue dress.

“I bought it off the librarian,” said Mrs. Jones. “She had ordered it for the young people’s library, but someone on the board said it was too pessimistic and not Christian. But the librarian assured me it was a wonderful book, she had read it as a teenager, and thought you were old enough for it. And the pictures in this one are real beauties.”

It was the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Fitzgerald translation, with color illustrations by Dulac. I still have it on my shelves, with “All best wishes on yr. 11th birthday, from Beryl M. Jones” inscribed on the flyleaf. If I balance it by the spine in the palm of my hand and joggle it lightly back and forth, it falls open to a familiar page.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Finn did come the next day, but Father McFall came earlier and brought the morning newspaper. PARATROOPER SAVES LIFE OF A-BOMB WORKER. It wasn’t as flashy as the story about the lady in a nearby town whose son was a bombardier on the plane that dropped the bomb, but both stories were on the front page, grouped beneath the caption LOCAL HEROES. There was a head shot of my father, with his acerbic smile, taken when he was promoted from assistant principal to principal of the high school, which made the picture the same age as myself. Next to it was an Army photo of Pvt. D. P. Finn with a frowning blur of a face, in full paratrooper gear, cradling his helmet next to his chest. You could see that his image had been lifted out of a group picture, which reminded me of the story of my mother cutting herself out of the Alabama photo. Though I prided myself on my rapid reading skills, Father McFall standing over me made me nervous and I had to keep doubling back over lines before they made sense.

They referred to my father as “the esteemed principal of Mountain City High,” which would make him snort when he got well enough to read this, and went so far as to name the building (K-25) his crew had been working on at Oak Ridge. Then came a quote from an Oak Ridge barber describing how everyone in the government town of 75,000, built in 1942, was bound to secrecy: “My customers and I talked about everything under the sun except the project.” The story said my father had been on his way home for his daughter’s (no name) birthday the next day. Could this information have come from the telephone operator who had kept me on the phone asking more questions? She probably had a sideline of calling in things like this to some contact at the newspaper. Annie would have known for sure. Finn had been quoted as saying, “I only did what I could. In combat training they taught us to use what we had in an emergency, and I had a shirt and a boot.” It said that until recently he had been a convalescent at the local military hospital, and that was all.

“But there’s nothing about her,” I said to Father McFall.

“There’s a separate item in ‘Deaths and Funerals.’” Father McFall found the page for me, folded the paper in half, and handed it back. ALABAMA WOMAN FOUND DEAD. Flora Waring, of Birmingham, Alabama, presumably hit by a vehicle, found dead on upper Sunset Drive. Body at funeral home awaiting burial arrangements. Authorities say accident is still under investigation.

“But we know what happened!” I said. “Why isn’t it in here?”

“We think we know, Helen, but nobody saw it. Until your father is able to tell us what he remembers, authorities can’t speculate, at least not on the record. There are legal deterrents.”

“You saw my father this morning?”

“I did.”

“You said there were ‘some problems,’ but you didn’t say what.”

“Why don’t we wait till we see which ones go away before we make a list?”

“Take it a day at a time,” I said.

“Exactly, Helen.” He looked pleased, not seeming to realize I was only quoting back his own hedging answer when I had asked whether Brian was going to be a cripple.


FINN DROVE UP later that morning in a strange car. I had been more or less watching out the window since Father McFall left.

“You’re in a car,” I said stupidly. He was wearing his dress-up clothes from the first time he came to dinner.

“I am,” he said, not appearing to note this infantile greeting. “Kindly lent by Mr. Crump, but it has to be returned to him within the hour. Ah, Mrs. Jones.” He stepped over to the sink, where she was washing up, and offered his hand. “Devlin Finn. I didn’t introduce myself very well last time.”

“Oh, Mr. Finn,” she said. “My hands are all wet.”

He waited while she dried them to her standards on her apron and then clasped them firmly between his, which I could see flustered her a little. “How is everyone doing up here?” he asked in a confidential voice, as though he and she were by themselves.

“It was a shock, Mr. Finn, but we’re managing. Is there anything I could get you? A glass of water?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Jones, but all I need is Helen here. I’ve come to pack up Flora’s belongings to take with me on the train to Birmingham. It leaves in a little over an hour and I’m going to need her help.”

It was the first time anyone had said her name.


I LED THE way upstairs, past Starling Peake without saying anything about whose room I hoped it would be, and on down the hall to the Willow Fanning room. There were important questions I was aching to ask, but something about Finn’s countenance held me back. If this had been in a fairy tale, a magician might had encased Finn in a lifelike mask and said, “You are safe behind this mask unless someone says something that can crack it. You need to guard against this happening or you’ll be destroyed.” I must have wanted Finn not to be destroyed more than I craved to have the answers to things only he could tell me because I held back, though it was very hard.

There was the old carpetbag in which she had carried the filled mason jars, Uncle Sam’s apple-cured ham, and her special flour (“I never go anywhere anymore without my self-rising flour …”), and there was the suitcase that, aside from underwear and some sanitary napkins discreetly concealed in hand-sewn wrappers, had contained the sack of cornmeal, tea bags, a cake in a tin box, and the wax paper parcels of Juliet Parker’s herbs.

Without the food, all the clothes that had arrived later in the box fitted easily into the suitcase. We did the closet first, and Finn showed me how to fold blouses in three parts, Army-style.

“You remember, Helen, that day on the walk, when we were telling our family histories, and I said I had a brother?”

“Yes.”

“And you asked me whether he was jealous when I got to go to America, and I cut you short.”

“You said, ‘That’s another story,’ and that it was enough about you.”

“What a memory you have! Well, now I want to tell you about Conan. When he was fourteen, Bill and Grace, my adoptive parents, invited him to come to Albany for a long visit. I was sixteen by then and had been with them for six years. Things weren’t good back in Ireland, my father was ill and unlikely to work again, and it was sort of assumed by all in an unsaid way that if Conan wanted to stay on with us in America he could. Well, he was over the moon with joy. Now I’ll get to the sad part quickly because there’s no use drawing it out. A week before he was to sail, he went into town to buy presents for us, and he was gunned down on the street.”

“You mean he was killed?”

“Shot right through the heart.”

“But why?”

“Because Ireland’s just that way now. It’s like your Civil War, only the two sides don’t wear uniforms and fight out in the open. They mistook him for another man’s red-haired son. All of us were heartbroken, but then as time went on I became sure I was the one responsible for his death.”

“How could you be?”

“Ah, because I had written letters praising everything, bragging about my good fortune, making him want my life.”

“But that doesn’t make you responsible—”

“Don’t rush me, darling. It doesn’t, but I felt that it did. Then the war started and I joined up and things got better until I lost my friend Barney, or until his mother came to see me and said she wished her son had been clever enough to get out when I had. After that, the two sorrows linked up—or, no, a better way to put it is that the weight of Barney’s death piled on top of Conan’s death made me feel so unworthy I didn’t want to live. Of course I didn’t understand the mechanics of all this going on inside me until the mind doctors explained it after my little failed attempt to extinguish myself. Now you’re wondering why I’m telling you this story, I can see it all over your face, Helen.”

“Why are you?”

“Because it may be useful to you if ever you start feeling that something bad that happened is all your fault. Fate is far more complicated than that, and thinking you’re in charge of it is egotistical and will only make you sick and waste your life. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes.”

“Now, where are the rest of her things?”

“There’s just what’s in those drawers.”

I had been dreading the drawers because I hadn’t decided what to do about the top one. I wanted to keep Nonie’s letters, but I also wanted Finn to respect me and I hadn’t figured a way to achieve both things. So I started with the bottom two drawers, leaving the top for last. Her stockings and lingerie and the hand-sewn wrappers in which she stored her sanitary pads. She hadn’t used up the second supply, which had come with her box of clothes. I was pleased with my tactfulness as I took charge of these very personal items, tucking them away in the suitcase with my own hands so he wouldn’t have to touch them and be embarrassed.

Finn glanced at his watch. It could no longer be postponed, the top drawer. But it was not as I had last seen it. On the left was Juliet Parker’s faithful stack of summer letters, but on the other side, where Nonie’s letters had been, was a package done up in gift paper I recognized from the stash of old wrappings from Nonie’s deep desk drawer. My first thought was that if Flora had gone snooping in our drawers, even in the interest of wrapping a present for me, then it sort of equaled out my intrusions into hers.

“These are letters from Juliet Parker.” I handed over the stack to Finn. “She wrote every single week.” I still couldn’t say Flora’s name aloud. “This other … I don’t know.” For me to say there used to be another pile of letters in here would be to admit I’d been snooping.

“It looks like a present,” Finn said.

“I know, but—”

“It might be for you. For your birthday.”

“But there’s no card.”

“Well, maybe there was no time for a card. Why don’t you open it?”

“I don’t —If you think it’s all right.”

“I know it’s all right,” he said, making a noble effort not to be caught looking at his watch again.

Inside were Nonie’s letters, all done up neat and tight in their ribbon. The folded note inside said,


Dear Helen, I hand these over to you, on your eleventh birthday. May they sustain and guide you as they have me. There are some personal parts, but I didn’t want to black things out like in those censored letters from soldiers overseas. It would seem an insult to her. I will miss these precious letters but you have taught me so many things I’m grateful for, which I will try to incorporate into my life and my teaching.

Love from your admiring cousin, Flora Waring.

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t look at him. It seemed I also was encased in a mask that one wrong word or move could crack. “Did you know about this?”

“I did. We talked it over. She said you had asked to read them, but she was worried some parts were too old for you. Then she thought about it some more and decided you would grow into them. She said she wanted to give you something you’d treasure and the letters were the best thing she had.”





XXX.


I think of Mrs. Jones, who was seventy that summer, driving after dark by herself to stand among the crowd gathered at the lake and say aloud, “Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten,” every time a pretty firework went up in the sky. Beryl Jones didn’t even know Stella Reeve, the little girl who had caught polio at the lake and died a few days later. She had only read about her in the newspaper, but she did it because her dear dead Rosemary, who in life had loved to make little memorial ceremonies, had suggested it.

I spent all those days and nights with Flora the summer I was ten and she was twenty-two: three weeks of June, all of July, and the first six days of August. I thought I knew all there was to know about her, but she has since become one of my profoundest teachers, though she never got to stand in front of a real class and teach.

These pages are for her. They are my attempt to stand among the crowd and say aloud for all to hear, “Flora Waring, you are not forgotten.”

“I came across this sentence I wanted to run by you,” my father said. This was back in the seventies. We were talking on the phone. There had been years when we didn’t talk, but now we had started again. “Here it is. I wrote it down for the next time you took it into your head to honor me with a call: ‘Suppose love were to evolve as rapidly in our brains as technical skill has done.’ What do you make of that?”

“Where is it from?”

“A Burnt-Out Case. Dr. Colin, the leprosy doctor, is talking to Querry, the burnt-out architect. The doctor is still opting for evolutionary progress in spite of all the terrible things men have done to one another in the first half of our century.”

“You were reading that again?” I was playing for time while I tried to work out what I thought about the sentence.

“Greene satisfies my perennial cynicism. But that little nugget of hope stuck out like a thorn this time around. What do you make of it? Is such a supposition likely?”

“Not in my lifetime,” I said, sensing his relief and approval through the receiver. “Certainly not in yours,” I generously added.

“Nope. I consider myself lucky to have gotten off with just an eye for eighty thousand and one lives. Well, just thought I’d run it past you.”

We both knew who was meant by the one life added to the final Hiroshima death count.

(“I had planned to leave Oak Ridge the next morning, the morning of your birthday, but then we got the news of the bomb. I went back to my room to leave Harker a note, since he might not have heard due to his deafness, but he had cleared out and left me a note. It said, ‘F*cking hell, Harry, this went too far, there will be retribution.’ When I got back to the site, half my crew had left and those who had remained were exhibiting the usual unsavory aspects of human nature. One announced that God had informed him about the bomb a week ago, but he had been under divine orders not to tell. Several of them petitioned for immediate jeopardy bonuses in case the whole place blew sky-high. One enterprising rogue was collecting bets on how many Japs had been killed and when the war would be over. And then there was the usual quota of worthy fellows cutting their eyes at you for approval: well, here I am, sir, ready to get on with the job, some of us have to be responsible around here. I realized I was more than a little unhinged and decided to leave at once, drive over the mountain before nightfall, and get out of this madness. I hadn’t touched a drop on the premises, but I was looking forward to driving up to the house and surprising you and Flora and then pouring myself a well-earned glass, or maybe more than one. I was thinking about that drink, in fact it was the last thing I can remember thinking about before I rounded the curve. It was dark as hell and then something flew out at me like a ghost. I turned the wheel as hard as I could to miss it, but I obviously didn’t succeed.”)

My father took a long time to recover from the accident. He “sustained,” as the jargon goes, a punctured lung, five cracked ribs, a broken femur (the polio leg), and the loss of his left eye. He referred to the eye almost cavalierly, especially in the old Hammurabi sense of an eye for an eye, and wore a black patch over it, but rarely mentioned the tragicomic dragging lurch, increasingly compounded by arthritis, that became his normal gait. He took even longer to emerge from a severe darkness of spirit in which he seemed to turn his unsparing disgust for human foibles completely against himself. (“Didn’t I tell you they’d find themselves a prince of an assistant principal, a young war hero and social scion with a good word for everybody and willing to coach the track team free of charge while one-eyed, gimpy, bad-assed old Harry takes his perpetual leave of absence?”)

His unlikely redeemer was the Old Mongrel himself, who took him out for long drives, settled his hospital bills, paid for us to have the Huffs’ cook (Lorena and Rachel had vanished into thin air the day after the bombing of Nagasaki, leaving a house that turned out to be rented and furniture that was leased, and without paying anyone except the manly riding teacher, who wisely got her fees in advance. They left behind a swath of delectable rumors, the prevalent one being that they were German spies. I think Annie Rickets’s speculations may have been closer to home: there was no Mr. Huff. Tall stories told by a woman of imagination and some ready cash who moves to town with her child are more easily swallowed in wartime.)

My father went into business with Earl Quarles, much to my amazement and disgust, and the two of them prospered in the postwar housing boom. When I was twelve I was sent to boarding school and became a little snob who vacationed with new friends and went home as seldom as possible—then on to college, followed by a breakdown and lengthy stay in an expensive institution, where I began writing, for therapy, but also out of disdain and boredom, a sort of elegiac tale about the Recoverers and the house my father and the Old Mongrel had torn down to build more of their mountain-view “estates.” Many reconstructions later, it was published as my first novel, House of Clouds.

When the Old Mongrel died in his upper nineties, my father demanded that I get on a plane and show myself at the funeral. Driving me back to the airport afterward, he dropped his bomb.

“Well, dammit, Helen, it was your doing.”

“My doing!”

“You were the one who told him I was the age of the century. And quoted the old doctor’s poem about the ‘cloud-begirded’ December day I was born. All he had to do was go look up the birth records at city hall and count back to his stepsister running away in May. It was there in front of our eyes, but none of us saw it—or wanted to see it. You might as well get used to having his genes. I have. It’s made sense of a lot of things for me. He was a crude, wily old rascal, a raw slice of genuine Americana, and that’s not the end of the world. For me, it was the beginning in many ways.”

These days it is easy to locate most people without leaving your desk. The question becomes what do you want to do with them after you’ve found them? Dr. Brian Beale has a private clinic in the Tidewater. He found me first, in the eighties, and has since critiqued all my books and told me why I wrote them, what I left out, and who everybody was. He’s a much honored member of the psychiatric establishment, one of his sons is in Congress, and he still gets about on metal crutches. He flies to London twice a year to see all the new plays and speaks with a distinct Carolina mountain twang.

Then there are those others you put off tracking down because you’d rather keep them as they were, or keep making them up, recycling them into new incarnations. Finally, when I was nearing the age of Mrs. Jones when she came to live with us for a year, I was just about to go to the Army’s website and do some serious searching, but instead on a hunch I looked up auto parts suppliers in the upstate New York area and found a chain of Finns. It was almost too easy to make the phone call.

“What a shame! You just missed him,” a woman told me.

“Do you happen to know when he’ll be back?”

“Ah, no, what I mean is, we buried him day before yesterday.”

“Oh, dear. I did just miss him, didn’t I?”

“Did you know Grandpop?”

“It was a long time ago. He delivered our groceries one summer at the end of World War Two. He’d just come out of our local military hospital, where he’d been recuperating.”

“Wow, that is a long time ago.”

“Listen, do you mind my asking something? Did he—did he have a good life?”

“Well, I’m probably not the most objective person to ask. I loved him to pieces. We all did. If you mean did he make a big splash in the world, his obituary ran almost an entire page in the Albany Times Union. He was the great benefactor, Grandpop. He was a huge supporter of the arts.”

“That sounds like him,” I said. “Well, I’m sorry I missed him, but it’s been nice talking to you.”

“Wait a minute!” she cried. “I think I know who you are, now. You’re that haunted little girl, aren’t you?”

“I’d never thought of it that way,” I told her, “but I suppose I am.”





Acknowledgements


Moses Cardona at John Hawkins & Associates for his astute first reading of Flora.

Nancy Miller and the house of Bloomsbury for reconnecting me with the passion of publishing.

Rob Neufeld, editor of The Making of a Writer and of our forthcoming volumes Working on the Ending, for his historical research on Asheville during World War II.

The late Gale D. Webbe for the invaluable chapter on his two summers spent working in construction at Oak Ridge in Sawdust and Incense:Worlds that Shape a Priest (St. Hilda’s Press, 1989).





A Note on the Author


GAIL GODWIN is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of thirteen critically acclaimed novels, including A Mother and Two Daughters, Violet Clay, The Finishing School, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, The Good Husband, and Evensong. She is also the author of The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961–1963, and The Making of a Writer, Volume Two: Journals, 1963–1969, edited by Rob Neufeld. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With the composer Robert Starer, she has written ten musical works, including the chamber opera The Other Voice: A Portrait of St. Hilda of Whitby. Visit her website at www.gailgodwin.com.