Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  “Now, Feron, I want you to sign this, and make it to me, and anything else you feel like saying.”

  Now I need to come up with an explanation, thought Feron as she turned to the title page and began writing slowly. I need an excuse for never sending her one.

  She wrote,

  To Merry, my friend (I hope) of twenty-one years.

  Feron

  Still without her credible excuse, she closed the book and slid it back to Merry, who opened it and read the inscription.

  She shut the book and smiled. That Merry-smile with no undermeanings behind it. “Yes, we are friends, Feron, and I love you just as much. Maybe more, because of all the thoughts I’ve had about you over these twenty-one years.”

  Feron regretted she hadn’t signed “with love” above her own name. “Do you know how I found out this book existed, Feron? I still didn’t know about it when I came to your uncle’s funeral last summer. But in September when I was taking a girl up to Lovegood for orientation week—our accountant’s daughter—I was introducing her to Dean Fox, and she couldn’t wait to bring it up. She assumed I had read it when it came out three years ago, and asked if I knew how you could write so knowingly about someone just out of a military prison. I said I meant to read it and would write her when I had. By the way, this is her last year as acting dean. You wouldn’t recognize the place, or, no, I shouldn’t say that, it’s just that so many nice things have been added to what was already there. They’ve bought up all the land around the original acreage—remember Cobb’s Corner?”

  “That derelict store with the tree roots and the stale Tootsie Pops.”

  “Well, now that’s the new library. Remember, the old one was inside our building. You liked to go there, while I did my homework mostly in bed.”

  Their food came. It was much better than Feron had anticipated, having taken Merry’s “plain but good” at face value.

  “That is the most beautiful scarf,” Feron said, mostly to keep herself from gobbling.

  “It’s one of my mother’s. She loved scarves, and so we always knew what to get her for birthdays and Christmas. I wear a lot of her things. They don’t go out of style, and with the farm and all I don’t have the time to shop.”

  “Is that ruby ring your mother’s also?”

  “They’re actually garnets, but yes it was. We’ve had it sized to fit my skinnier finger. Feron, this is my wedding ring. I married Mr. Jack after harvesting season last fall. Are you surprised?”

  “I don’t know what I am. And you still call him Mr. Jack?”

  Merry colored again. “We’re working on that. It’s something that happened over time, Feron. I’ve known him practically all my life. We were children when Daddy brought him home. I was eight and Ritchie was two. One day he was just there to stay. There he was, building his own house on our land. Daddy admired him because he had a graduate degree and knew all about fallow fields and soil chemistry, and he worshipped Daddy. He had come looking for a job, and Daddy was flattered that this young man had thoroughly researched Jellicoe Farms, down to statistics and crop histories, and told Daddy it was the place of all places he wanted to be.”

  “How much older is he?”

  “Jack is fifty-six. We are sixteen years apart.”

  “Do you have a photo of him?”

  “Not with me. How stupid of me not to bring one. He’s a big man. Six three. Gray hair, what’s left of it. Scars all over his forehead, like me, where basal cells have been cut out. So he wears a baseball cap most of the time. Like I wear hats and scarves.”

  (Is he attractive? Are you attracted to him? Is it sex? Have you been his lover for a while? You’re forty, do you still mean to try for babies?)

  “I think you’d appreciate him, Feron. Like you, he keeps himself to himself. His parents and grandparents were tenant farmers. Which makes him uneasy in social settings, though he comes across as distant and proud. Some people like him, some don’t. But they respect him, because he knows more about the things they care about most than they know themselves.

  “But, Feron, you know what? It was something you said at the Algonquin that influenced my decision to marry.”

  “Something I said?”

  “You were talking about marrying Will. How you felt when you looked at him when you were exchanging vows. And you said you felt—do you remember?”

  “I remember how I felt, but I don’t remember what I said at the Algonquin.”

  “You said, ‘Everyone should get what they want at least once.’ ”

  “You’re saying you wanted him?”

  “I was what he wanted. For years and years. And I had the power to give him that one thing.”

  “But what about the others?”

  “What others?”

  “Other men. Other boyfriends. Between when you were eighteen till now.”

  “I saw other people, but Feron, you have to remember that at eighteen I became Ritchie’s guardian and had charge of Jellicoe Farms until Ritchie came of age. And I saw Mr. Jack every day. It was strange. I was his boss, but he knew the business inside out and I always ran things past him. And we were sort of substitute parents to Ritchie. We went together to see him in his school plays. We took turns driving him places until he could drive himself. And Ritchie went through periods where he found Mr. Jack useful. Boys need men for men things.”

  Merry was studying the garnet ring. One faceted center stone encircled by smaller ones. Feron still wore her gold wedding band on her right hand.

  “Jack has known the people I loved best. He can tell me stories about Daddy and Mama and about Ritchie that I would never know otherwise. And we’re working for the same goals. We always were, but now there’s the security of knowing if Jellicoe goes under, we will still be partners looking out on empty fields and deciding together what to do next.”

  “Is going under a possibility?”

  “Indeed it is. You wouldn’t believe, Feron. When I was growing up, tobacco was king. Now it’s a murderer on trial. There’s actually a billboard near our farm, it has a picture of a huge pack of cigarettes and underneath it says: How to Kill Several Million People in Your Home State.” We’ve already had offers from three developers. Hamlin is within commuting distance of the Research Triangle, and our acreage could support two large subdivisions, or one subdivision and a golf course and a man-made lake. We could sell and enjoy our riches somewhere else, only we are both work addicts, and we both feel ties to the land. Mr. Jack, I mean Jack, has always wanted to have horses, and we could have a stable and farms growing something else and still do the subdivision. But we need to study up on it more. Neither of us knows enough about real estate.”

  “Ah,” said Feron, digging into her purse and producing the little card:

  THAD S. HOOD

  SURVEYORS AND APPRAISERS

  NO PROPERTY TOO SMALL OR TOO LARGE

  “Maybe you need the help of my first cousin Thad.”

  She was about to add, “He saw you at Uncle Rowan’s funeral and said you were sublime.”

  Then thought, what’s the point?

  22

  Two men, beer glasses in hand, were playing the Board Game. Raucous cheers, groans, some cursing. Finally when one of them graduated to the f-word, Patty the waitress strolled over and murmured something, nodding toward the women in the booth.

  She came over to apologize to them. “They get so worked up. I swear sometimes it’s like they’re back in that old war, fighting it all over again. Can I get you some dessert? Fresh iced tea?”

  “I think we’d both like some more iced tea. Feron, what about dessert?”

  “We have Christmas fruitcake drowned in bourbon, little minced pies made fresh this morning, and there’s always brownies. Everything à la mode, of course.”

  “No, I’m fine,” said Feron.

  “Me, too,” Merry said. “Patty, would it be all right if we just hung out a while longer? My friend and I have a lot to catch up on. If it gets crowded, I promise
we will get right up and leave.”

  “It’s not going to get crowded the day after Christmas, Miss Jellicoe, except for the Board Game squadrons. Would you believe, on a slow day, we make more on that old historical map with its flashing lights than we do with the food?”

  “Yes, I believe you. Some of my crew drive over here just to play.”

  “I’ll get the tea. You’re sure about the desserts, now.”

  “We’re sure. Thank you, Patty.”

  When they were alone, Merry asked Feron if the man in Beast and Beauty was based on the man on the bus who had informed her about the Irish village.

  “I told you about the man on the bus?”

  “Our first day. It was when you and I were making our beds, and you said your mother had named you after this actress in a movie. And then you told me there had been this man beside you on a bus who told you there was a village in Ireland named Farran, with the different spelling.”

  “I remember us making our beds, but I don’t remember telling you about the man on the bus. As for the movie actress, I’ve searched and searched and found no Ferons. It would be interesting to know the true story of how I got my name. Where did she really get it? Who suggested it?

  “Did I ever tell you what a liar my mother was?”

  “You said she was an alcoholic …”

  “She was also a consummate liar. If I had the time to spare, I would make a list of things she told me and then in a column opposite I would try to figure out what the true story might have been. Fabrication was just her way of life. If something happened and she was reporting it, she would likely make up something completely opposite. Like that Board Game they are so rapturous about over there. Making up a different ending.”

  “You know, Feron, after all these years I feel I haven’t even scratched the surface of what you must have gone through. So, the man with no name in the book, was he based on the man on the bus?”

  “The simple answer is yes. I didn’t reveal it in any of my newspaper interviews about the book, because I thought it made a better story to leave out the mundane basis and stick with the fairy tale angle. See? I’m my mother’s daughter, tell a different story whenever you get the chance. In the interviews I focused on how I came to write Beast and Beauty. I took this writing class at Columbia from a former superstar named Alexy Cuervo. Did you ever hear of him?”

  “No, but I’m not really up on the literary scene. I didn’t even know about your book, Feron.”

  “Well in 1958, while we were rooming together at Lovegood, he became an overnight prodigy with his first novel, Nito’s Garden, which remains his only novel to date. He wrote it in Spanish and translated it into English, and both versions were published simultaneously. Which made a big stir in itself. It was a weird little novel about a boy who lives behind walls in a South American garden where nobody he comes in contact with reveals to him that he’s a monster.”

  “That gives me the shivers. What kind of monster?”

  “That’s never exactly revealed because we’re always inside his head. But slowly you realize that everyone he comes in contact with has some abnormality that makes them assume they are monsters. He sees them and hears them talk about themselves, but he never thinks he is one of them.”

  “But if we’re inside his head, how do we know he’s a monster?”

  “Because it’s an artful piece of work. The critics salivated over Nito’s Garden. They called the author a boy genius, and lavished all their academic rhetoric on the little book. It was short, just over a hundred pages, with the imprint of a classy publisher. I looked up the old reviews before I signed up for Cuervo’s class. Nito remembers watching conversations between his caretakers before he learned to talk. Then later he matches the meanings to the words and gestures. Cuervo even shows how this can happen by using the example of learning a foreign language. Some reviews said the novel was Caliban’s version of The Tempest with Prospero and Miranda left out, or they speculated it was a clever allegory in which the young author had portrayed himself and his acquaintances. Others maintained that it wasn’t a portrait of particular people but a brilliant aggregate of the vices and stupidities of an entire generation. It helped that Cuervo was an interesting mix—Chilean father and Russian mother—and was striking to look at. He still is today. He’s small but perfectly formed with a classical face. Anyway, the celebrity of Nito’s Garden, or El Jardín de Nito, as he prefers to call it, has paid his way through two decades of reputation and grants and lectureships. He’s never written anything else. In our first class meeting, he told us to write anything we wanted as long as we didn’t bore him with conventional narrative. And here was I, submitting revised pages of my marriage novel to him—a conventional narrative now titled A Singular Romance.”

  “Oh, Feron! What happened?”

  “Surprisingly, he liked it. He said it could have been written a hundred years ago, but there was a strangeness about it and I should cultivate the strangeness. Then he said I ought to take a break and write something else. A fairy tale in modern dress. He sent me to the library to look up an expert work on folktales and see which fairy tale called out to me, but while I was actually walking to the library, the whole thing had already formed in my head. The story of a woman living safely in an enclosure with an outcast—another monster, if you like. And she finds herself loving him, as long as they don’t go outside.”

  “I understood that! Many women have felt the same, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I was on fire. It was exactly what I wanted to write. I gave them names, but Cuervo convinced me to leave them nameless like in the fairy tales. He wouldn’t let me name Chicago, either, but anyone who had been there could guess it. I wrote steadily for six weeks, even at work. When I wasn’t editing some consultant’s pitiful report, I just rolled in a piece of copy paper and typed away. Then everything happened really fast, which made me doubt I had anything to do with it. Cuervo showed it to his contacts, and I found myself with a publishing contract for the great sum of fifteen hundred dollars from the same classy house that had published Nito’s Garden. When Beast and Beauty came out, I had reviews in the right places—again, I chalked it up to Cuervo’s string-pulling, but he said that was the way it worked in New York, and I should leave off being a buscador de alma—a soul-searcher—and bask in the attention. He said it would be over soon enough. It lasted a little longer than he predicted because of women’s lib. Beauty got all she could from Beast, he even liberated her in the right direction. Well, that was one opinion. Then there were some mean ones, which I seem to remember word-for-word. ‘Either a cunningly-timed feminist fable or a handbook on how to use people.’ And a headline: ‘Who Is the Monster Here?’ But it sold out its first printing, which was all of two thousand, and there was a film option, which got renewed twice, then abandoned. Oh, and the academics had their say, too. ‘Ms. Hood is a practitioner of the grounded surreal.’ Cuervo loved that one.”

  “I liked him. Your beast, I mean. I rooted for him. I knew early on, because you alternated their chapters, that she would probably leave him. I liked her, too, in a different way. She reminded me of you sometimes.”

  “In what way?”

  “Her privateness. When he first sees her on the bus, she is spreading out her things in the seat beside her so no one would sit there. I could picture you doing that. That’s not a criticism, Feron.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, she has this complicated place in herself he can’t go. I often felt that about you. I felt the way he did. Was he really an ex-convict from a military prison?”

  “Yes, he had been released from Leavenworth the day of the evening I met him. But I kept everything generic like in the fairy tales. Specific places never named.”

  “What had he done?”

  “Ran over his sergeant with a Jeep.”

  “Did he kill him?”

  “He crippled him up pretty badly. If he had killed him, he would probably still be inside.”
r />   “I know I shouldn’t ask, but did the physical part between you really happen?”

  “Yes and no. He was unbelievably gallant, maybe unnaturally so. When he found out I was a virgin, he let us do everything but. Or, who knows, maybe he was impotent. In the novel, I let her talk him into it the night before she leaves.”

  “I cried at that part. When she says she wants him to leave his mark on her so later she wouldn’t look back and think it never happened. Was he really an artist?”

  “He was a medical illustrator. That was his job training in prison. But he was always drawing portraits of me. Once—I shouldn’t tell you this—”

  “Please do!”

  “We were talking about my virginity and I said, ‘I don’t even know what it looks like, that thing.’ And he sat down with a piece of paper and drew a vagina with the hymen covering it sort of like a cloud will halfway cover a moon.”

  “I wonder what happened to him. Do you know?”

  “I tried to erase him happening to me until—well, until I transported him safely into a fairy tale and secured him there.”

  “Will you tell me his name?”

  “I will not. You can’t get all my secrets out of me, Merry.”

  “Does anyone ever get all of someone else’s secrets out of them? I don’t think so.”

  “What about you? Are you still writing?”

  “Oh, yes, but I’ve given up hope of publishing anything again. But I did bring you …” From the canvas bag she pulled out a glossy magazine. “This is yours to keep. See? I even made the cover.”

  Rows of waving gold leaves stretched to the edges of the cover. Superimposed, in white letters edged in gold, was

  The Tobacco Issue

  The Slave Who Discovered Bright Leaf

  by

  Meredith Jellicoe

  “Well, this sure looks like a publication to me,” said Feron, turning to the page Merry had flagged with a sticky note.

  “But it’s just a state magazine. I didn’t even get paid for it. I spent almost a year writing it, and then they cut one third of it. No, don’t read it now, Feron. Not many outside the industry know the story of the slave who fell asleep and let the curing fires go out in the barn. His name was Stephen Slade, because slaves took their owners’ last names, and he was nineteen years old. For such a mistake in the 1830, a slave could be skinned alive or sold to pick cotton. But he piled charred logs on top of the embers and rekindled a roaring fire, and the sudden intense heat dried all the moisture from the curing tobacco and produced a beautiful unsplotched gold leaf. His owner, Abisha Slade, turned that discovery into a formula for bright leaf tobacco, which caused the flue-cured revolution in the tobacco industry and made fortunes for the Duke and the R. J. Reynolds families.”