Flora Read online

  The first evening I was all set to be sociable, as I had been with Nonie and more recently my father when they were making our meals, but I soon saw that it didn’t matter much to Flora whether I kept up a running commentary or stayed quiet. I wondered whether she might be the slightest bit slow-witted, and even anticipated with a superior thrill how I would have to get us through the summer without outsiders suspecting.

  We ate in the dining room. At the last minute my father had removed the papers that were piled there. We had answered all of the condolence notes that had come in so far. Except, of course, the one from the old mongrel, which my father had crushed in his pocket. On Monday the postman would bump up our driveway with more mail, and maybe a letter from my father. Already I was fast forgetting his unsavory side.

  It would soon be the longest day, and with the sun pouring through the dining room’s west windows, we didn’t light the candles, though Flora recalled how Nonie had always done it with such gracious ceremony.

  “Didn’t you have candles at home?” I asked.

  “No,” said Flora, “but I remember when I was little how Daddy and Uncle Sam ate their breakfast by the light of a candle in a mustard jar.”

  “You mean in the winter when the mornings were dark?”

  “Oh, no, all year round. Even in summer, they left the shades down. They got in the habit of eating breakfast in the dark when they were younger and worked in the iron mines.”

  “Why would anyone want to eat breakfast in the dark when they’re going to spend the whole day down in a dark mine?”

  “That’s what I thought when I was little. But Daddy said miners prefer it. Later, Juliet told me Daddy and Uncle Sam also liked it because it reminded them of before they had electricity and their mother still made their breakfast.”

  “That was my other grandmother?”

  “No, she was your mother’s grandmother. That would make her your great-grandmother.”

  “Did you ever know her?”

  “No, but your mother remembered her. When she was a little girl she had to help take care of her and it wasn’t pleasant. The old lady was bedridden and couldn’t even go to the bathroom. She should have gone to a nursing home but back then families didn’t do that and also our family was too poor.”

  “It’s just as well, then,” I said, cutting Flora off before she said any more about going to the bathroom at the table.

  “What is, honey?”

  “That I had just the one grandmother, who was wonderful.”

  “Yes, she was. I don’t know where I would have been without your grandmother’s support. You were so lucky to have her, though it’s a shame you couldn’t have had Lisbeth, too. I was thinking on the train coming up, I had more time with your mother than you did. Lisbeth was a little mother to me.” Predictably the tear ducts opened. What would it be like to produce such easy evidence of your feelings? Yet I also felt superior to Flora in my habit of restraint.

  “Could I ever read those letters?”

  “Well, honey, they were private, you know.”

  “You read them aloud to everybody after the funeral.”

  “That probably wasn’t such a good idea. At least your father didn’t think so. But I meant it as a kind of tribute. And I didn’t read any of the really personal parts.”

  VI.

  Sunday began badly with the taxi driver and would get a lot worse.

  “Y’all better get your dad-blamed driveway fixed before somebody busts an axle and prosecutes.”

  “Oh!” yipped the adult-in-charge to whom this rebuke had been addressed.

  “We are having it seen to, now that the war is over,” I piped up in my grandmother’s voice.

  “Oh, seen to!” he imitated in falsetto, jolting us sideways to avoid a rut.

  We were driven in hostile silence down Sunset Drive. It was a sultry, overcast day. I got an uneasy sensation as we passed the spot where my grandfather’s shortcut lay in ruins. There was a familiar smell in the taxi that reminded me of my father. At least he was spending the summer in a place where sobriety was enforced.

  “We will need a taxi to take us home after church,” Flora humbly ventured as she clumsily selected coins with her gloves on to pay the driver.

  “I’m off duty now, lady. Just call the number.”

  “We can get a ride home with Mrs. Beale and Brian,” I said as we headed up the sidewalk to the church.

  “You go first, Helen.” Flora nudged me ahead of her into the nave.

  I led us to our family’s usual place in front on the pulpit side. Nonie liked to be up close so she could do without her glasses. Too late I realized that whatever Flora did wrong would be seen by everybody behind us.

  “Are the Beales here yet?” she was anxiously whispering before I could sink to the cushion for silent prayer.

  “They will be. You better kneel down.”

  I didn’t remember how Flora had comported herself here during Nonie’s funeral, but it wouldn’t have been so noticeable that day, with so many people from other churches bobbing up and down at the wrong times. Today she dutifully mimed my actions. When it came time to follow in the prayer book, she kept leaning over to see what page I was on. During Father McFall’s sermon she turned red trying to suppress a cough until an imperious hand from behind tapped her shoulder and shoved a lozenge at her.

  I made her go up for communion, because by that time I was so distressed it mattered very little to me whether she was eligible to take the sacrament or not. At the conclusion of his sermon, Father McFall had asked us from the pulpit to join him in saying the Prayer for a Sick Child. Brian Beale, he announced, had come down with polio over the weekend.

  Father McFall himself drove us home. “When I saw you from the pulpit, Helen, I realized you hadn’t heard about Brian.”

  Flora sat in front with the rector, who was diplomatically grilling her. He began by saying that he had been among the listeners when she was reading Mrs. Anstruther’s letters. Next came cordial inquiries about her Alabama life, her plans for the future, and her summer plans for the two of us. (“Though some activities may have to be forfeited, with this polio outbreak.”)

  Brian had gone swimming at the municipal lake, which was now closed; one other child, a little girl, had been stricken and was in an iron lung.

  “But his mother never lets him go to the municipal lake,” I protested from the backseat. “Mrs. Beale is scared silly of diseases.”

  “Well, this time, rightly so. But it was a hot day and Brian was lonely and bored, so she gave in and took him and even went in the lake herself. She has scarcely left his bedside at the hospital.”

  “Does this mean Brian is going to be crippled?”

  “We’re taking it a step at a time, Helen.”

  Though it gave his old Ford sedan a severe shaking, Father McFall allowed himself no comment on our driveway. I remembered to say, “Won’t you come in?” as Nonie always did when people brought me home, but he said he had hospital visits to make.

  “Will you see Brian?”

  “I’m headed straight there. Do you have a message for him?”

  “Tell him I said please get better soon.”

  Tell him I’m sorry. It was my fault.

  “I’d like to visit you two during the week, if that’s all right. I’ll phone first,” Father McFall said in parting.

  Inside the screen door, we found my Keds tied together with a ribbon. There was no note.

  It was a hot day and Brian was lonely and bored.

  If I had been there, he wouldn’t have been either of those things. We would have been in our outdoor sanctuary under the trees in his fenced-in backyard, which was visible enough from an upstairs window for his mother to spy on us. We would have drunk her iced apple juice and played Brian’s favorite game, in which he was either auditioning before a hard-to-please New York director (me) for a lead role or being coached by the director in his role.

  If I had stayed at Brian’s last week rath
er than languishing in luxury at the Huffs’, he would have been in church this morning. As I passed his pew, his princely little profile would have swiveled just enough to beam me a possessive greeting: didn’t we have fun this past week? After church, the Beales would have driven Flora and me back to Old One Thousand and maybe Mrs. Beale would have let him stay overnight. Flora would have made hot biscuits to go with the ham, and for dessert there would have been more of the pound cake she had brought in the suitcase from Alabama. After supper, Brian would have sat down at our out-of-tune piano and picked out some show tunes, and Flora would have praised him and remarked happily on what a nice evening we were having, and then she would have excused herself and retired to the Willow Fanning room. And Brian and I, as we had done since we became spend-the-night friends back in first grade, would have separated to undress and then reconvened in either my room or his, which was my grandfather’s old consulting room. We would have snuggled hip to hip in our pajamas on top of the spread, covering our knees with a quilt, and taken turns reading aloud. I was the faster sight reader, but Brian liked to practice his delivery and his English accent. Sometimes we read from the books we had outgrown for the sake of doing the parts. He was always Eeyore and Piglet and I was always Pooh.

  All Sunday afternoon Flora kept watching me mournfully as though another member of my family had died and she was expecting me to fall to pieces any minute. “Let me know if I can do anything, honey,” she kept saying.

  “Don’t you have anything you need to do?” I was finally driven to ask.

  She looked hurt, then recovered herself and said she had been hoping to use her time off to prepare sample lesson plans for whichever job came through. She had interviewed for three: one for sixth grade and two for fifth.

  “Then why don’t you go and do that?” I said.

  But as I prowled around downstairs after getting rid of Flora, I felt the house ignoring my existence. I kicked open the kitchen screen door, noticing for the first time that the bottom board, where my foot always landed, had split.

  I decided to walk completely around the house and force it to acknowledge me. The day was still under that stubborn haze that withholds either rain or sunshine.

  When was the last time I had walked all the way around this house? It seemed that for years we had climbed into our cars and gone somewhere and come back and gone into the house. When was the last time anyone had walked around this house? This made me think of Brian, who might never be able to walk around his house again. Other thoughts came. I pushed them away until all that was left was the forlorn scene I was walking through. Everywhere things were falling apart. Peeling paint, missing roof tiles, an unattached downspout swinging tipsily out from a roof gutter. The former “front lawn” had become a weedy slope ending in unkempt woods, where two broken old trees had collapsed against each other and were rotting together. Did I really remember a lawn green and smooth enough for me to roll down, over and over again? Who had been with me? A woman dressed to go somewhere else, looking off into the distance. There was discontent in the air. Was it mine, or hers, or just the day in general? Was I remembering my mother or was my memory as unreliable as my father’s memory of my grandfather’s shortcut to town? It seemed hard to believe that when the Recoverers took their constitutionals on this lawn they could have looked out through healthy, upright trees and seen the mountains. Yet a charming recovering drunk, Starling Peake, had painted a small canvas that hung on our living room wall, testifying to this lost view. “Poor Starling,” Nonie would say. “He let us down, but he was happy the day he painted that picture.”

  What had my mother seen when my father brought her to Old One Thousand for the first time? “It must be wonderful to live in a house like this”: those were her first words to my grandmother. Could the house have disintegrated that much in twelve years, or had my mother been being polite, or had she been more worried about the impression she made and not really noticing what was in front of her? Or had it seemed like a grand house, compared to what she had been used to? The way Flora talked, the Alabama house seemed far from grand.

  At last I reached the garage, where yesterday, from the window of my room, I had spotted the unsightly new weeds blocking the entrance. Now, as I wrenched open the garage doors, I imagined those weeds shrieking as I crushed them flat. With a heavy sigh I climbed into the driver’s seat of Nonie’s car and laid my face down on the steering wheel. The dull heat pressed in. Spit trickled out of my mouth onto the hot leather. I began to feel funny, but something told me that I would have to endure it if I wanted anything to change. I had never fainted before, but Nonie had often described what it felt like. Then I must have lost consciousness for a second or two. The next thing I knew, I was sliding down from the seat and leaving the car.

  That’s right, darling. Now close the garage doors. You’ll come back later when it’s cooler and shear those nasty old weeds flat to the ground with the kitchen scissors. We can’t fix everything at once, but this will be a gesture in the right direction. And I want you to move into my room. It was my place and now it will be yours. When Mrs. Jones comes on Tuesday, ask her to prepare the room for you. Tell her I came to you in a dream and said to do this. Mrs. Jones respects dreams and is partial to the supernatural. Remember how provoked I was when I found out she was telling you those stories about her little dead daughter, Rosemary, and that uncle who kept speaking to her through a crow. But then you and I had a little talk, you couldn’t have been more than five at the time, and you said, “Don’t worry, Nonie, I don’t believe in her ghosts, but I do like the stories.” And I said, “All right, then, as long as you know the difference.”

  VII.

  When I told Flora at supper that I was going outside to cut down some weeds with the kitchen scissors, she merely asked did I want her to help.

  “No thanks, I need to do it by myself.” I was sitting at the head of the dining room table, Flora having insisted it was my rightful place when my father was not here.

  “Okay, honey.” She got up and started clearing the dishes, and that was that.

  I felt as though I’d gotten away with something. Every other person in my life at that time, adult or child, would have made some remark about my intention or the impracticality of the scissors, but not this literal-minded cousin. In all the years since, I have come across few people who can keep their personalities out of your business. I haven’t been one of those exceptions myself. Someone I once wanted badly told me at the end of his patience with me, “I have yet to find a person willing to let me do what I have to do without making clever comments or saying what I ought to do.”

  I say Flora was literal-minded. Was that it? Was she inclined to take things at face value because she was prosaic, unimaginative, lacking in cunning? I recall her being all of those things at various times. Once when I was mad at her, I called her simple-minded, and she bowed her head modestly, as if I had paid her a compliment, and said, “I expect I am.” Later that summer I told someone Flora was simpleminded, but he said he thought I must mean simple-hearted.

  Something had been left out of her, but was that something her virtue or her deficit? Was she single-hearted (not an attribute you hear mentioned much anymore, as in that old dismissal prayer that exhorts us to go forth “with gladness and singleness of heart”), or was she a member of that even rarer species, the pure in heart? I am still making up my mind.

  It was getting dark when I sheared through the last clump of weeds in front of the garage door. My fingers ached from gripping the scissors. The weeds had been more resistant than expected. They had squashed easily, but were tough to cut. Every time I made another trip to the woods to dump their remains, I could hear them jeering, “We’ll be back, little girl, twice as many of us: we’ll be growing over your grave.”

  Flora was listening to the radio in the kitchen and making a list of the groceries we were going to order tomorrow.

  “Helen, sit down a minute and tell me what kinds of meals Mrs. Anstr
uther fixed for you.”

  “Oh, just normal everyday things.”

  “Such as?”

  I was still outside with my slain weeds. And hovering just beyond them was a hospital door I wanted to keep closed. Behind it was Brian, transformed into a cripple because of my selfishness.

  “What did she make for breakfast, for instance?”

  “Oh, cream of wheat, oatmeal. French toast if we weren’t in a hurry.”

  “No eggs?”

  “French toast has egg in it.”

  “But I mean—”

  “And I had hard-boiled eggs in my school lunches.” Nonie always put in an extra egg for Brian. He enjoyed having to peel them. Nonie worried he didn’t get enough food in its whole state. His mother cut off the crusts on his school sandwiches, and carved smiley faces into his radishes.

  We moved on to suppers. Yes, Flora said happily, she could do meat loaf and cube steak and macaroni and cheese. And she was sure she could make creamed chipped beef if she knew what kind of beef you used. Had my grandmother kept a box of recipes?

  “No, it was all in her head. She cooked for her father until he married again.”

  “Yes, the awful stepmother. That’s when she packed her bag and ran away and a handsome doctor stopped his carriage and said, ‘Young lady, can I take you somewhere?’”

  “No, he said, ‘Can I carry you somewhere?’ And it wasn’t a carriage, it was a cabriolet.”

  In all those letters, it would have been natural for Nonie to have related parts of her history to Flora, but that didn’t keep me from wishing she hadn’t. How many people could repeat accurately the things they were told? Look at that game, Gossip, where the sentence whispered into the first ear is unrecognizable when it reaches the last. People didn’t listen. Or they heard what they wanted to hear. Or changed it to make a better story.

  “My grandfather was from South Carolina,” I explained to Flora, “and they say ‘carry’ down there instead of ‘take,’ when offering a ride. And he was thirty years older. She saw him as elegant, not handsome.”