by Gail Godwin
She had said he read too many of those fright comics.
Yet, within the span of that awful day, she had found herself face-to-face with a new Mr. Jack.
“I’ve put Ritchie out downstairs with one of my Benadryls,” Mr. Jack had announced, looming in the doorway of her room. Confused by the upside-down-ness of all that had passed since she was last in this room, Merry was not lying in her own bed because, before her life flipped over, she had made it up for Feron so her friend would not have to look out at the black barns.
“Would you like to try one, Miss Meredith?”
“No, thank you. I think I’ll just lie here in the dark.”
“Then I’ll leave you to it. Unless you want some company.”
And she had said, whether from courtesy or not wanting him to feel rejected. “Oh. Okay.”
She made room for him to lie beside her, but his feet in their big shoes hung over the end of the bed. To put him at ease, she had made some silly remark about it still being a little girl’s bed.
“I know. And I shouldn’t be in it,” he said hoarsely, and then to her astonishment he laid his elbow across his face and began to sob, with helpless gasps in between, like a child.
She was eighteen years old and had never lain on a bed with a man, let alone a sobbing man. She tried to imagine what would be the most adult thing to do. Should she slip her arm under his neck and put her face close to his and say comforting words as she did with Ritchie? She really hadn’t a clue. Neither she nor Ritchie had cried yet. It was all like something beyond a bad dream, and she could have used some reassurance herself.
Then somehow she was holding this big man, his head burrowing between her breasts, his tears soaking her pajama top. She could smell his pungent maleness, also a first for her. The high school boys she had dated would always arrive at her door doused in shampoo and toothpaste and aftershave scents. This man smelled of underarm sweat and soil and burnt grass. He had been “putting the fields down” for the winter when his pager went off.
Dr. Alistair Worley. Why him, just now? The psychology class back at Lovegood where he had them discussing the last sentence of that magazine story. But there was one thing Queenie missed. Merry had contributed nothing to that class discussion about what Queenie missed: being a virgin on her wedding night. Merry seldom spoke up, for fear of making a fool of herself. But she remembered thinking during that discussion that she didn’t intend on missing what Queenie had missed, even if she couldn’t picture very well how it would take place when it happened.
The big body covering hers. “I’ll take care of you, Miss Meredith.”
“Oh …”
“Am I hurting you?”
“Not … too much.” Polite to the end.
“Oh, Miss Meredith … oh, Miss Meredith …”
She had meant to tell Feron more about Ritchie. What a rare human being he was. He had been more than a little brother. He grew into her guardian, her teacher, her beloved compensation for having lost so much else.
Everyone should get what they want at least once. Feron describing herself standing at the altar with Will.
Losing a husband you had loved for less than a year, how did that compare with losing a brother you’d loved for almost nineteen—plus the three posthumous years and counting. But to be fair, Feron also had those posthumous years of loving to get through. Her novel, English Winter, how did it start? How did it end? What were the bed scenes she hadn’t put in?
(“I just had this thought,” Ritchie had said, only hours away from their turned-over lives.
“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.”
“You have the strangest thoughts, Ritchie.”
“Strange interesting or strange scary?”
“A little of each.”)
Had Ritchie been one of those lucky people who got what he wanted at least once? It seemed to her he had gotten it twice. He had passionately wanted the part of the Stage Manager when his high school drama group put on Our Town, and he had gotten it. He had passionately wanted to enlist in the air force even before the draft, and he had done it. (“Now they’ll teach me to fly and I’ll see the world and I’ll be able to go to college without us having to pay for it. I’m all set, Merry Grape. Now all I have to do is live.”)
I meant it today when I told Feron I hadn’t expected to see her again. Will I ever hear from her again?
She did seem happy for me about the Atlantic story. But writing a novel about a lost husband has to be demanding. She said to think of her stopping by the library to consult the Chekhov story with the good bed scene in it. I hope it helps. But, oh, Mr. Sterling, I’m afraid you wasted your money on me. A book of connected stories about people’s secrets in a southern tobacco town. Where would I start? I certainly wouldn’t begin with mine. I have drafts of other stories about secrets. One is about Maud Petrie, from her point of view. I am a minor character in it, visiting her apartment, the one she shared with Miss Olafson, after I had left school, and seeing the single bedroom and the one bed. And having her see me understand. Yet, speaking of people’s secrets, Mr. Sterling couldn’t sell such a story even in 1968, should I offer it. He wouldn’t risk his reputation by sending it out to magazines. Feron was baffled why I would take Petrie as my pen name. I neglected to tell her our favorite teacher had left me all her books, and I didn’t tell her about Miss Petrie and Miss Olafson’s relationship. Maybe she had figured it out for herself long before I did. I loved Maud Petrie. Not the way she and Miss Olafson loved each other, but my heart took her in.
Feron said that besides Will I was the only other person in her life she had felt comfortable spending all day and night with.
I can’t remember ever seeing Feron cry. My first sight of her in the Lovegood parking lot, before I knew she was going to be my roommate, she looked at odds with someone or something. That look has not changed. I saw it on her face after I had hugged her. She still has the stoop and the at-odds-with-someone look, and it didn’t occur to me until after we sat down at the Algonquin today that the dark front tooth was gone. She had just gotten her crown when she was coming to visit us on that terrible day that turned my life upside down.
I think of Feron and me lying on the grass in front of Lovegood College, and me, the untried me, saying blithely, “The worst that’s ever happened to me was my dog, Sam, dying.”
19
1976
The Castle, the inmates called it. Having abided by its rules and customs for a third of his life, he had been set free with gate money, job training skills, and a set of civilian clothes. The black double-breasted overcoat, prewar Brooks Brothers, had pleased him until he saw his antiquated plate-glass reflection bobbing up and down like a scarecrow among the newer overcoats on today’s streets.
He had two seats to himself on the bus. Directly across the aisle an unfriendly looking girl spread out her belongings across the empty seat beside her. She didn’t want company either. People kept walking to the back of the bus. That’s when he realized buses must have toilets now.
At the next terminal he looked out the window and saw the restless line of new passengers waiting to board. And soon enough, a woman attached to a little girl eating a moon pie stopped beside him and looked accusingly at the empty seats on either side of the aisle. “Mavis, you sit beside the young lady and I’ll sit next to the gentleman.”
“I want to sit next to you,” screamed the child.
“Well, you can’t, Mavis, because there aren’t two seats together.”
Frowning at the unavoidable, the girl across the aisle had begun dismantling her barricade.
He was on his feet, scarecrow overcoat folded over his arm. “No, please. You two sit together. I’ll join the young lady.”
“If that’s okay with you,” he addressed the frowning girl, who answer
ed him with a shrug.
—opening of Beast and Beauty, by Feron Hood. Knole, 1976.
_______________
Lovegood College
Office of the Dean
October 2, 1976
Dear Feron,
Congratulations on Beast and Beauty. Now Lovegood can list a novelist among its alumnae. And thank you for your generous donation to set up the Sophie Sewell Hood scholarship for an incoming first-year student. And last but not least, thank you for inscribing a copy of your fascinating novel to me. It is rare to receive so many gifts in a single package!
I remember you well from the beginning of that 1958 term when Miss Darden and I were discussing possible roommates for you. Winifred Darden died last spring (stroke, but mercifully no lingering). Winifred embodied a spirit of Lovegood that was in place long before I arrived. Her graciousness made my job smoother, often without my even knowing it at the time. How delighted she would be by the Sophie Sewell Hood scholarship. She and I often discussed how fast things were changing all around us and how we must hope and plan to accommodate the Spirit of Change without forfeiting Lovegood’s values. On good days, I think we’ve been moderately successful. On other days I feel like someone waiting for both shoes to drop.
I read Beast and Beauty the day it arrived. It’s the perfect length, and the black and red cover art, those two lovers going up in flames, is compelling. Eloise Sprunt (still teaching math and science) has it now, and we are going to compare notes after she’s finished. I like that they are never given names. It creates the mood of a tale. The man is an unusual character. One fully expects he will take advantage of the girl, but it turns out she takes advantage of him. The outcast is kind and generous and becomes the agent of her freedom. I had remembered the fairy tale all wrong, I realized after I went over to the library, which now has its own building on campus. The beast in the fairy tale was also kind and generous (except when he loses his temper with the father). I imagined pairing your novel with the fairy tale for class discussions. The erotic scenes wouldn’t be acceptable in an 1878 classroom, maybe not even in a 1958 one, but here we are, halfway through the 1970s and in the midst of a feminist revolution.
Since your time here, the campus has sprouted five new buildings: a science and business building, a sports center with basketball court, indoor tennis courts, and an Olympic pool, the new library, a new dorm with en suite bathrooms, and a dining hall with conference rooms. The dining hall stands on the site of Miss McCorkle’s old Quonset hut. She also still teaches full time, only she is now Mrs. Radford. He is a retired high school history teacher, and it’s a first marriage for both of them. It is quite a love match. You should see them crossing the campus arm in arm. Our enrollment has doubled; there are currently fifteen members of the Daughters and Granddaughters Club, and Lovegood still remains one of the dwindling number of junior colleges for women, where, if you recall the pageant song, “removed from strife … they may seek the mental life.”
In four years, I will step aside as dean, though the trustees are working on an honorary title complete with housing so they can keep me close by as a figurehead, but with no power. “Sort of like the Queen of England,” as one of them said. Lovegood has made leaps of progress, but the postwar times were conducive, and things probably wouldn’t have been all that different if someone else had been dean. Though when I tell them that, they say I am just being modest, and perhaps they are right.
Do keep in touch, Feron. I was going to put you on the mailing list for our handsome quarterly brochure with all the updates, but saw someone had put you on it already. I will bet anything it was our Winifred Darden.
With Warm Regards,
Susan Fox
Dean
PART THREE
20
1979
A week from today, the new decade would begin, “the eighties,” and whatever it would bring. For the first time, Blanche Buttner and Feron attended the Steeds’ Christmas party alone. Uncle Rowan had died on the job in late August. Finishing out his fourth term as mayor, he had flown to D.C. to meet with his friend the congressman to secure Pullen’s water rights. The state capital had been curling its tentacles around a wider circumference of small North Carolina towns in commuting distance from the capital, and Pullen didn’t wish to partake of pumped-in water from some shared system. Driving himself home from the Raleigh airport, he stopped at his favorite barbecue place, ordered seconds, had a stroke, and was borne away to the hospital, where he never regained consciousness.
Feron had of course flown down from New York to be with Blanche for her first Christmas alone. Driving them home from the airport, Blanche said, “If it’s all right with you, Feron, I’d like to attend the Christmas parties. Rowan would expect it. He’s only been gone four months, and people will be wanting to talk about him. And we’ll be his living ambassadors.” Blanche the fiancée had quickly and efficiently transformed herself into Blanche the widow.
This Christmas, “the Steeds’ party” had become “General Steed’s and Marguerite’s party” because the past year had taken Mrs. Steed as well.
And as Blanche had predicted, everyone did have something to say about Uncle Rowan: Rowan Hood the young lawyer, who’d saved their farm from foreclosure; Rowan the pilot, who’d taken his old girlfriend, now in her seventies, up in his Piper (“he turned the plane upside down and liked to scared me to death”); Mayor Hood (“Honey, he’d’ve been elected by a landslide for a fifth term … he had the weather eye to see what Pullen was going to need before we knew it ourselves”). Several men who’d been partaking liberally of the general’s bourbon alluded to parties “with wild girls” at the young lawyer’s house, and the night, years later, when Mayor Hood stood out on his lawn with his arms crossed and stared down the drive-by shooter who had phoned ahead to say he was coming to kill him.
This year’s fashionable parties in New York would be showcasing the latest in furnishings and catered foods, while in Pullen tables and chairs stalwartly stood in their original locations, and the hosts faithfully offered the same dishes that had graced their tables fifty years before. Maybe if she had been raised in such a structured world, Feron would have run screaming for the exits long ago. But she was charmed by these traditions she had never lived inside.
As her fortieth birthday approached, she visualized her life to date as a stack of colors. Infancy and early childhood with grandparents and mother was colored gray, not the soft dove gray of a young mouse, but the ashen gray of grownups’ extinguished dreams. Age four to almost eighteen with Swain and her disintegrating mother were a brownish-yellow, like brackish water with snakes in it.
The bus ride episode had a layer all to itself. At first it was colored the lackluster black of Dale Flowers’s hair color out of a bottle. However, in the early seventies, after her writing teacher at Columbia, Alexy Cuervo, had shamed her into abandoning “middle-class fiction” and assigned her to “modernize” a fairy tale, the bus interim in her life took on the red of the tumbling figures on her book jacket and her own brief taste of success.
The Uncle Rowan rescue and the innocent years at Lovegood Feron had colored white. She alone knew that it was a fake white because of what it covered up. Like the crown that eventually covered the front tooth ruined by Swain.
The green layer from the days of Will still lay like an ache in her chest, first the awakening green of Will’s mother’s garden to the misty-green of Yorkshire during their short marriage.
How many more layers and colors was she destined to travel through? If someone offered her a preview of the stack of her remaining life-colors, would she accept out of curiosity or turn away in horror?
“We haven’t met.” A man with a December tan was extending his hand to Feron. “I’m Thad Hood. We almost met at Uncle Rowan’s funeral back in August, but you were so deep in conversation with that sublime little woman in the black hat that I couldn’t bring myself to barge in. Actually, I’m your first cousin. Your father and my fat
her and Uncle Rowan were brothers. My father, Simon, died when I was a baby, you’ve probably heard about that freak spinal when he was having his appendix out. When I was in my terrible teens, Uncle Rowan saved me from dissipation and ruin and probably jail, but that’s another story. And you’re his long-lost niece who writes books and lives in New York.”
“So far, it’s just the one book, but how nice to have a cousin. How is it I never met you before?”
He was her least favorite type of handsome man. You could see him checking himself over with approval in front of the mirror before setting out for this party.
“I just retired from the navy. Twenty years away from Pullen, and I return to find it exactly as I left it. Which makes my wife, Lou, ecstatic. We’ve had her family’s old house moved out to the country on a flatbed truck, and she stays inside it, in the middle of a twenty-acre field, pretending our last two decades in beautiful, exotic places were just a bad dream. You’re widowed, aren’t you? Or should I not have brought that up?”
“I’ve been a widow for almost seventeen years, so I’m pretty used to being one.”
“Listen, I want to talk about Uncle Rowan. Can I bring you some refreshment from the table?”
“The eggnog would be good.”
“From the teetotaler’s bowl or the spiked bowl?
“Oh, spiked, please.”
Marguerite Steed approached. “I saw you looking at the dolls. The one in Japanese costume is new since last Christmas.”
“They really are exquisite, Marguerite. I am so sorry you lost your mother.”
“We both had big losses this year, didn’t we? This town won’t see the likes of your uncle again.”
