by Gail Godwin
“But she told you.”
“I’m not everybody. She likes to talk to me about the school because she knows I’m interested in that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“Oh, the history of things and how they change over time and sometimes turn out the opposite of what was planned.”
“Like ‘Lingering on the Lawn.’ ”
“What? Oh, you mean my story.”
“She expected to graduate with her friend, and they were making plans for the future, then suddenly she’s back on the college lawn with her friend and wonders how this can be. But it’s a fever dream from the flu that’s about to kill her. By the way, don’t let this go to your head, Merry, but in ‘Typhus’ we stay inside the young soldier all the way through his fever but then he recovers. You carried it one step further than Chekhov. You followed her over the threshold into death.”
“Only I didn’t get very far over that threshold.”
“But you furnished us with a glimpse. I can’t think of another story, by anybody, who does that.”
Susan Fox had chosen to stand for this interview so that when the small, impeccably turned-out Lothario approached, he would find himself having to look up at Lovegood’s five-foot-nine dean.
“How are you, Dr. Worley? How are your classes going?”
“The girls are enthusiastic. We examine a wide range of human behavior. I try to keep them on their toes.”
“I heard about that magazine story that went over so well. ‘But there was one thing Queenie missed.’ ”
“Modern young women like to decide for themselves whether or not they are missing out on … well, on certain old traditions.”
“Such as remaining a virgin until your wedding night.” Good. She had raised a flush on the psychology teacher’s cheeks. “And your melancholy biographies—only, you call them something else.”
“Discordant Personalities and Divided Selves. We spend several weeks on that topic. Famous cases. Tolstoy, Paul Bunyan, Persephone …”
“Now I would have liked to sit in for your Persephone class …”
“Why is that, Dean Fox?”
“Well, it seems to me that having lived with the King of Darkness, she could never feel at home above ground with all the beautiful flowers. Because now she knows that all beautiful flowers die. And, also, there’s something about her underground consort that she longs to get back to—but no, Dr. Worley, I’m not going to let you psychoanalyze me. I asked you here to discuss those evening counseling sessions you’ve been giving the girls.”
“It’s just the girls who volunteer to type the class stencils. A messy job. It’s my payback. If they have a problem they want to talk over in the confidentiality of a professional setting, I’m available on Tuesday evenings.”
“The sessions, they’re how long?”
“I generally keep it to a half hour. Sometimes forty minutes, depending on how many have signed up.”
“And when a session is over, what then?”
“I’m not sure I understand, Dean Fox.”
“The session is ended, the girl stands up, or both of you stand up, and then what?”
“We say goodnight, and the next girl comes in.”
“But after you two stand up and say goodnight, and before you open the door for the next girl, does anything else happen?”
The visible alarm of a boy caught out. A half-century-old balding Lothario. His wardrobe, like the clothes-conscious male teachers at Saxon Hall, tended toward English tweeds juxtaposed against gaily adventurous ties. Today a floral pattern against navy blue. Dr. Worley wore a gold signet ring on his left pinkie. No wedding ring.
Time to strike.
“Any exchange of affection is what I mean, Dr. Worley.”
“These girls are affectionate. They come from homes where spontaneous natural feelings are expressed.”
Wait it out. Let him squirm.
“I suppose there may have been … occasional kisses. But we’re talking about fatherly-type kisses.”
The psychology teacher was one of Lovegood’s prized two PhDs, the other being Dr. Phillips, the religion teacher.
The Lovegood Board of Trustees, to which she reported, consisted of nine men and one old widow of a trustee who never expressed an opinion.
“Well, in the interests of all concerned, I’m going to ask you to discontinue your evening sessions after we return from the Christmas break.”
“Have there been … complaints?”
“Let’s just say it has been brought to my attention. Look, Dr. Worley, I know you’ll agree that the last thing either of us wants is for the generous gift of your time to come under a cloud.”
Pause. Wait.
“So many things get misconstrued these days. The sessions were something I thought would be of help—and I daresay they have been of considerable help to many of these girls, but, as you say, the last thing we would want is for my … gift … to come under a cloud. Consider the Tuesday counseling sessions at an end. As of this meeting.”
“I’m sure every one of those girls is the wiser from having experienced your sessions, Dr. Worley. What will you be doing over the Christmas break?”
“We’ll be going to Sea Island. It’s a tradition of my wife’s family. What about yourself, Dean Fox?”
“I am going to try the mountains this year with my recently widowed friend. Both of us are New Englanders and are longing for some snow.”
“You and your friend won’t be disappointed. I hope you are staying at some rustic mountain inn with a four-course breakfast.”
“We are, we are, Dr. Worley. Thank you for asking. Well, Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, Dean Fox.”
“When we meet again, it will be a new year. I wonder what it will bring?”
The previous year, her first Christmas break at Lovegood, she had slipped up. Having given a Thanksgiving luncheon for the teachers the day before everyone departed for the holiday, she had announced to the dorm mistress that she might just spend Christmas in her lovely quarters and have some time to herself.
“But you can’t do that, Susan. The college closes down for the Christmas break. Florence Rayburn goes home, and so do the rest of the staff.”
“But what about you, Winifred? I assumed you stayed. I had thought we might explore the city, you could show me the sights.”
“Oh, no. I always go down to my cousins in Fayetteville. They are all very kind to me.”
“Well, why shouldn’t they be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I often wonder what they think I am. I’m not sure it’s anything close to what I think I am. But enough of this old maid talk.”
So last year, the dean of Lovegood College and her imaginary friend, the widow from New England, had found last-minute accommodations at a charming boarding house in Beaufort, walking distance to the sea.
During her tenure as dean of Lovegood, Susan Fox added so many realistic touches to her widowed Christmas friend that she felt she could have recognized her in the dark. She knew what this friend took in her coffee, what shampoo she used, her foibles and prejudices, her pet expressions, the secrets of her late marriage. When the time came to kill her off because the dean had found living friends to share holidays with, Susan Fox knew what hymns had been sung at her friend’s funeral, and why, and what scripture had been chosen, and why.
12
“Well, Feron, looks like all the Hoods are using the Christmas holidays to refurbish ourselves. You’ll finally be getting your tooth crowned, Aunt Mabel is booked in to have her operation, and I’m headed up to Duke to get a series of electrocutions to restore my mental balance.”
Which meant that Feron would be staying with Uncle Rowan’s fiancée in her antebellum house in the nearby town of Benton Grange.
Blanche Buttner’s household was in another galaxy from Aunt Mabel’s. It offered new comforts and graces, but amplified Feron’s growing awareness of her compromised upbringing and h
er social lacks. She liked the appointments of her upstairs room overlooking a garden of gloomy statuary, though the room got no sun until late afternoon. She liked having a bathroom all to herself for the first time in her life. She liked the breakfasts laid out for them by the cook every morning. You edged your way along a serving table and lifted the lids on silver dishes, and there were scrambled eggs kept warm over a flame, there were oatmeal and biscuits, either sausages or bacon, and warm stewed fruit. The first stage of Feron’s dental work had been completed: Swain’s damaged front tooth was now drilled down to a sharp little point no one would ever see and covered by a temporary crown until the permanent one could be fashioned from a mold.
Blanche was “statuesque” to her friends and “buxom” to people like Aunt Mabel. Following a breakfast of tablespoon-sized helpings of egg and oatmeal, one slice of bacon, stewed fruit, and black coffee, Blanche in her quilted kimono with a dragon crawling down the back retired to her sunny office to sit at a desk with pigeonholes and make phone calls and take care of her correspondence. This took at least two hours. Personal letters, thank-you notes, club accounts—she was treasurer of at least four clubs—and business pertaining to Buttner Oil and Gas, founded by her grandfather and whose stock she still held. After that began the many-layered ritual of Dressing for Lunch, and around noon she would depart for whatever luncheon she was attending that day. Returning about 2 P.M., she would shut herself in her downstairs rooms for a “refresher” nap. After that, she and Feron would drive to town for necessities, which at this time of the year meant shopping for Christmas presents.
Left to organize her own routine, Feron spent more time than she thought healthy dwelling on her own insufficiencies. Being in Blanche’s house only reinforced her certainty that she would never catch up in ways that mattered because she lacked the proper foundations. She was doing well at Lovegood and had no unfinished schoolwork. Her teachers liked her, probably because she exceeded what they had expected of her. The other students seemed to respect her, but maybe that was because she was usually with Merry, who would always pass on anything they said. Girls saw her as “reserved,” “mature,” or “unusual,” Merry reported back.
“But those aren’t exactly compliments, are they?” Feron said. “They could go either way.”
“I’m sure they were compliments, Feron. Otherwise they wouldn’t have said them to me.”
During the Swain years, she had been a straight A student because she escaped into studying. Her one close friend in high school told her she came across as “too aloof,” but that friend had moved away. After her mother died, Feron’s grades hit bottom as she tried and failed at her short-sighted attempt to escape Swain.
There was a nice writing table in her room and even a telephone, but since she would be spending the last week of the holidays with the Jellicoes, it seemed pointless to write, and Hamlin counted as a long-distance call from Benton Grange.
Benton Grange had a different layout from Pullen and was not as easy or as satisfying to explore on foot. Its streets radiated from a central monument to a violent and bloody battle won by the Confederates that had given Benton Grange its status as a town. On this site a century earlier, there was only Mr. Benton’s large house and farm buildings. In the last months of what they were still calling “The War Between the States” in these parts, a regiment of Confederates had used the Grange as an arsenal until Sherman’s Union troops arrived and routed the winners.
The house and buildings formerly known as the Grange were situated on either side of the monument of a general on his rearing horse. They served as a hospitality center and a Chamber of Commerce for Benton Grange. Next came a park cupped by a semicircular road of fine old homes, including Blanche’s. The privileged semicircle then fanned out on one side into less impressive spokes. Along one spoke was a hardware store, a beauty parlor, a drugstore, and various shops, some of them good enough for Blanche to patronize. You could walk up and back on that street, looking in the windows, then go to the next spoke over, which was a dusty road with a supermarket, a furniture store, a filling station, Blanche’s Catholic church, and some fields, after which came a row of Negro shacks, then more fields ending in the entrance to the newly built interstate highway. Or you could skip that spoke and take the one with the school, two protestant churches, each with its own graveyard, a well-manicured funeral home with an operating fountain in front, then another creek, this one smelling of chemicals, and then sudden green and rolling landscape and beautiful young specimen trees and shrubs surrounding the new Sylvania plant.
For Feron’s lunch, the cook left ham or cheese biscuits wrapped in wax paper, fresh fruit, cookies, and a pitcher of iced tea. Feron was left to wonder what had happened to the morning’s leftover bacon or sausages, until enlightened about the Catholic church’s soup kitchen, founded by Blanche’s mother, where all their uneaten food went right after breakfast, dropped off by the cook.
“What did Uncle Rowan mean about ‘a series of electrocutions’?”
“You’ve heard of electroshock therapy, haven’t you?”
“Sort of.”
“Do you know what manic depression is?”
“Merry Jellicoe’s mother goes into this dark period every winter, and sits by herself in an old hayloft. But in the spring she’s herself again.”
“With Rowan, it’s more like flashing periods of activity and then a sudden plunge into listlessness and melancholy. When he’s in his up periods, he has all the energy in the world and believes he can do anything. When he feels the depression coming, he hides it as long as he can, then he goes up to Duke and checks in for a few weeks.”
“I’ve never noticed Uncle Rowan seeming depressed.”
“That’s because he didn’t want you to notice. Self-control can go a long way, though fewer people choose to make use of theirs these days. The long days of summer are usually good for him, then in autumn he begins to sink, if he’s going to, and then by November he books himself into the psychiatric wing.”
“He met me in the early summer. If I had arrived in November, I wonder if he would have asked me to stay.”
Blanche laughed. She was driving them down the spoke that led to the supermarket. “As a matter of fact, he proposed to me at the summer solstice fifteen years ago. But that has worked out quite well. Rowan and I are each other’s mainstay and always will be. But, surely Merry’s mother doesn’t sit in a hayloft all during the winter months.”
“Oh, no, it has been turned into a room on top of the house. Merry says you can see the lines where the opening used to be.”
There was one awful thing Feron did during her stay with Blanche. They had bought a Christmas present, a really nice bed jacket that could pass for a silk shirt for Aunt Mabel, who was recovering at home with a practical nurse after her female surgery. “What time shall I suggest we drop by?” Blanche asked Feron. “I’d like to phone over there first.”
“Oh, you go ahead without me,” said Feron.
As soon as it was out of her mouth and she saw the surprise and distaste Blanche was struggling to conceal, she wished she could pull it back. This was the Feron speaking out of her former life, when she had nothing left to lose and resented every little thing they asked of her, and made a point of refusing as much as she dared. (“Do you want to ride with us to the store, Feron?” “Well, could you at least make a list of the things you’d like to eat?”)
A deadly moment passed.
“Rowan expects this of you,” said Blanche. That was all she said.
On Christmas morning, Feron was to find an embarrassing number of gifts for herself under Blanche’s tree. Every one of them showed careful choosing. A portable tabletop radio with an antenna. A silk scarf with swirls of turquoise and green and yellow. A pair of black leather gloves. A fifty-dollar gift certificate from Blanche’s favorite Benton Grange shop. Feron gave Blanche a box of subtly striped man-sized linen handkerchiefs—Blanche deplored the ladies-sized ones where you found yourself
blowing your nose on lace. Blanche gave Uncle Rowan a cashmere cardigan in a cranberry color, and Feron gave him a paisley necktie, which Blanche had chosen. Uncle Rowan gave his fiancée the Caron perfume she wouldn’t buy for herself because it was immorally expensive. Then they all had Christmas dinner at the Greek restaurant, where they were much fussed over, and Blanche drove her own car back to Benton Grange to get ready for her church’s Boxing Day party for the poor. Uncle Rowan took Feron to visit the recuperating Aunt Mabel, who told Feron “not to tell Blanche,” but she was exchanging the bed jacket for something more to her taste. Then he drove Feron back to Benton Grange. Having been alerted by Blanche, she deduced from his few heavy sighs that he was controlling his low spirits as best he could. He was probably counting the minutes until he rejoined the company of his laundered shirts on the sofa and the lemon and olives in the refrigerator.
13
Jellicoe Farm, December 26, 1958
“Why are you making up your bed for her, Merry Grape?”
“Because my bed has the nicest view.”
“What’s wrong with the view of the curing barns? Don’t you think they look spectacular with their new coats of paint?”
“Waking up in a strange place and seeing five black barns between her window and the horizon might seem like a bad omen to Feron.”
“I don’t see why. I wish I had them outside my bedroom window.”
“Feron has a darker history than we have.”
“Oh, how?”
“I told you. Her parents are both dead. She ran away from her stepfather, who beat her.”
“Why?”
“For him, beating was just part of their family conversations, she said.”
“That’s hilarious. I love that!”
“Now, move, so I can tuck in the top sheet.”
“I just had this thought.”
“What?”
“The curing barns are beautiful when they’re empty and closed up. And the fields are beautiful when everything’s been cut down and carried away. But when people are empty and flat, they’re just dead.”
