by Gail Godwin
“So at least Stephen didn’t get skinned or sold to pick cotton.”
“No, his owner gave him a small farm, and then the Civil War came and ruined Abisha Slade. Stephen raised tobacco on his small farm, lived as a free man until the age of ninety-three, and was buried on his own land.”
“What a story. Why did they cut a third of it?”
“To make space for all the advertisements that keep the magazine in business. It was long. I counted the words when I was cutting it, and it was originally seven thousand words. I could have made it longer, there was so much material. I felt close to those times because they overlapped with Horace Lovegood’s dates, and it was fascinating to compare the two stories going on at the same time in the same state.”
“But why do you say you’ll never publish again?”
“I’m afraid I let Mr. Sterling down after my fluke success with ‘The Curing Barn.’ I did send him two more stories, and he couldn’t place them anywhere. Too long for the magazines, or nobody wants to read about farming, or they were inflammatory.”
“Inflammatory?”
“Both stories are about the end of harvest banquet that growers throw for the seasonal workers. The first was from the point of view of the grower’s daughter, who is upset because she helped prepare the food but wasn’t allowed to eat with the workers. The second was the workers’ version of the banquet. That was the one that was considered inflammatory because the growers came off looking like exploiters. Mr. Sterling asked would I consider cutting and changing some things and I said I’d try. But I lost interest and never did. Every year he sends me a Christmas card with a nice note. He always ends with, ‘Remember, I am always here for you.’ ”
23
“Mama’s summer starts today!” Ritchie would always shout at winter solstice. Winter solstice had been four days ago. Some years it fell on December 21; on others, December 22. This was a December 22 year.
Just as 1958 had been.
At winter solstice, their mother’s spirits began their seasonal climb out of what she called her Slough of Despond. By harvest time in autumn she had sunk pretty low, and November was the bottom. During November and early December, Ritchie kept reminding her, “Not much longer, Mama!”
That afternoon in 1958, when Mr. Jack showed up too early at the house and Merry had been making up the bed for Feron’s visit, Ritchie had calculated they were probably in the air heading home from the Greenbrier. “Her mood is already better. I can hear her saying to Dad, ‘Can’t you already notice the difference in the light?’ ”
Merry chose to take the two-lane county road home and look at the way things used to be. The new truck’s diesel engine hummed along on a baritone note.
“You drive a truck,” Feron had said in the parking lot.
“It’s what we always had. I’m used to having an empty body in case I want to pick up something and carry it somewhere else.”
“It’s very pretty. Is it hard to drive?”
“No. I’ve driven one all my life. This was a wedding present from … Jack. I probably wouldn’t have picked red for myself, but it’s a deep red, and he’s had this beautiful logo painted on the cab doors.”
“A leaf.”
“A tobacco leaf.”
“Hmm,” said Feron. Whatever that meant.
Feron is the most complicated person I have ever known. That late afternoon when we were lying on the lawn in front of Lovegood and talking about the class poet of 1918, I was wondering what had happened to her, and Feron tapped her fingers in the grass, adding up the years. “She would be in her upper fifties. Her life would be—not over, but set, congealed—like Jell-O.”
She compares things and makes you see more. She turns things around and lets you see another side.
And after she read my “Lingering on the Lawn” story before I turned it in to Miss Petrie. She said it was a success, but I needed to let the reader know right away it was set in 1918. Also she said “ordinary” didn’t suit someone who was going to be the class poet. She suggested other words. “Optimistic might pack the most wallop, since she’s going to end up dying,” she said. That’s a perfect example of the way Feron turns things around. Dean Fox said it was called irony.
And at the Algonquin when she was describing how she felt at the altar beside Will. “Everyone should get what they want at least once.”
When I was making up my mind whether to marry Mr. Jack, I thought how happy it would make him, after all his years of feeling guilty, then doing it again, then going back to feeling guilty. Why not make things right?
As for myself, I think what turned the corner was rereading that Chekhov story, “At Home,” about the young woman returning from her education to the family estate on the steppe. An eligible doctor wants to marry her, but she doesn’t like him. Finally she accepts him. She sees how peaceful it would be to stop worrying over some vague future and accept the steppe as her destiny and make the most of what she can do at home.
Miss Petrie may not have been a complicated human, she was too tamped down, all her strength had been used up daring to live with the woman she loved. But she was complicated enough to recognize complicated writers. “She is leading us toward an acceptance of being left in uncertainty,” Feron had pointed out.
And today, describing walking to the library to get started on Cuervo’s fairy tale assignment and having the story she wanted to write form in her head as she walked: about a woman who found she could love a man as long as they didn’t go outside.
Her flashes of insight have influenced my life—or revealed something I would never have thought of myself.
Mama, in her dark days, had her complicated side. She never spoke of what went on inside her Slough of Despond, though Ritchie pestered and pestered her for details. In her dark days she would go up to that old loft room and sleep under some blankets. Did tobacco farming bore her? Did she regret quitting college to marry Daddy? Had she fallen out of love with Daddy? If so, had he known it?
Ritchie would definitely be a complicated person today. He had been growing into it. Maybe he’d already become one when he died in that combat mission.
Feron hadn’t changed much. She still had that look of being at odds with someone or something. If you were being critical, you might say that age had frozen that expression in place. She had let her hair grow long and wore it pulled back severely from her face, which made her look schoolteacherish. Merry had been surprised that Feron hadn’t dressed for their lunch, but maybe she was taking a vacation from having to dress for her job every day.
The story about the man on the bus had been sort of what Merry had assumed might have happened. But somehow the story about the drawing of the hymen had shocked her more than young Feron having lived with (the nameless convict) for more than a week.
Feron’s first cousin on the card. She would call him and ask his advice. Feron said she had inherited her uncle’s house, and the cousin had advised making some improvements so she could charge a higher rent.
Maybe, now that Feron owned a house in Pullen, they would live close to each other when they were old. She could imagine it. They would take turns driving to each other’s houses and comparing the complaints of their aging bodies. It would be a long, long friendship, catching up on each other’s stories over decades.
“You can’t get all my secrets out of me, Merry,” Feron had warned her.
“Does anyone ever get all of someone else’s secrets out of them?” She had countered. “I don’t think so.”
And I don’t.
24
Buttner House
11 Park Crescent
Benton Grange, N.C.
December 26, 1979
Dear Merry,
I read your wonderful article as soon as I got back to Blanche’s house. She was out all afternoon—her church has a gift-giving day for the poor the day after Christmas—so I sat on her glassed-in sun porch and read “The Slave Who Discovered Bright Leaf.”
It r
eads like a story. I was hooked by the first sentence when he smells the last thing in the world he would wish to smell, a fire gone out, and realizes he has done the unforgivable, fallen asleep on the job. You got inside his head—his fear, his panic, his envisioning all too well his probable punishments, and then his wild inspiration about the logs. And you stayed with him till he was dying, a free man on his own farm where he is buried today.
You did that with “Lingering on the Lawn.” You got inside the girl who would become the class poet and stayed with her till the end, when she is delirious and thinks she’s back on the lawn at school with her friend. You stayed in there right up to her death and followed her over the threshold, just as you did with him. (I’m glad the magazine editors had the sense to leave that part in.) Do you remember when we were walking back to Lovegood with our stale Tootsie Pops and I said not to let it go to your head, but you’d carried it one step further than Chekhov went with “Typhus,” because in that case the soldier recovers?
When Alexy Cuervo sent me off to look into the morphology of folktales, he said he was being like the person in the tales who sets the hero a task. That person is known as “the Donor.”
Let me set you a task, Merry. Mail a copy of the magazine to your agent in New York. Also send him your uncut manuscript. Tell him you have been engaged with this for a while and still feel there’s more to uncover about this interesting life. Ask him what he thinks. Would it make a novel? I think it would.
It was great seeing you today. I am glad you still consider me your friend.
Love,
Feron,
Your “Donor” and friend
Now, to seal the envelope of Blanche’s elegant gray notepaper and lick a stamp, all of which lay ready for use in the guest room desk drawer.
And run downstairs with this letter and push her good deed through the slot of the sweetgrass mail basket on the console table by the front door.
It’s time to get out of here.
She had sounded this inner alarm in these environs before. The evening she and Uncle Rowan were in Howard Johnson’s, and an elderly couple with a serene middle-aged daughter came in. “That’s General Steed and his wife. And that’s their daughter, Marguerite, who has one of the finest collections of dolls in the world.” He went over to their booth to say hello, leaving Feron alone with her wake-up call. Surely as a young woman, Marguerite Steed must have had other plans for herself than becoming a doll collector still living with her parents.
After she had gone upstairs with Marguerite yesterday and been introduced to the “personal” dolls, which were much more interesting, Feron couldn’t decide whether Marguerite was content with her controlled environs, or whether she was biding her time until her eventual breakout.
Feron had spent the first six months of her young widowhood in this same upstairs room of Blanche’s stately house, looking down on the shady walled garden guarded by its gloomy statues. Sat at this same desk under the same lamp and jotted fast pages in a notebook. Rushing to “get down” Will as he faded, before important things drained through the holes and the whole marriage seemed like a dream.
Soon realizing that complete sentences and paragraphs and chronological order were not her friends, she had resorted to snatching whatever rose to the surface with a description, an ellipsis, a shard of dialogue catching something Will had said or taught her during walks under the Northumberland skies.
Hail like big white marbles on Haworth Heath … then wet snowflakes … then sun emerges FOR ONE MINUTE out of a boiling mass of gray and purple clouds.
F: Think of all the stuff that isn’t in Wuthering Heights …
W: Think of all the patterns that are in it.
F: Why did medieval artists want to be anonymous?
W: They thought of themselves as copiers or illustrators of something that had gone before. They thought it was a higher order of art than trying to be merely oneself and “invent” something new.
Dog misericord in Lincoln Cathedral.
W: The medieval mind focused on the essence of a thing, the modern mind wants to label it. The carver who did this wanted to capture the dogness of a dog, the way a dog would move and act. We would first have to categorize it as “a spaniel,” “a retriever,” “a collie.”
F: If you were a medieval carver, how would you express my essence?
W: I would start with your wary grace of moving. Or your graceful wariness of moving, I’m not sure which. It was one of the first things I noticed about you.
F: Why “wary”?
W: Like someone anticipating a lightning strike or preparing for an assault, but what I love about you is, you keep marching on, your face revealing nothing.
W’S SMELL: starched cloth, grass, salt on his neck, soap in the hollow of his ear … the arousing gaminess of his underarms.
The curiosity that goes with love. YOU CAN NEVER KNOW ENOUGH about the other person.
“You looked like someone trying to be invisible.” That was how Beast, aka Dale Flowers, had put it when they were lying together in the rented room in Chicago, exchanging their first impressions of each other.
(“Will you tell me his name?” Merry had asked.
“I will not.”)
She had said too much, more than she meant to. How did it happen, how had she slipped beyond where she meant to stop? A spike of uncharacteristic generosity (I will surprise this old friend by offering up something really special)? Or did I fall into that old trap writers are always falling into when someone asks, Did that really happen? If you say, No, I made all of it up, it’s probably a lie, or a partial lie. If you say, Some of it happened, but I changed some of it around—well, if you say it often enough, one day you may actually lose track of what happened and what didn’t. She hadn’t reached that point yet, but had certainly breached her self-imposed boundaries.
To give of your private self is dangerous, and you usually regret it.
Did she regret it today?
Yes, yes, yes.
Time to get out of here.
Back to the inconspicuousness at MacFarlane & Company, where she could exist in plain sight, hoard her creative energies, and collect benefits. Back to her present Park Avenue residence of a MacFarlane manager on leave, where she could postpone acquiring things and feel like an untethered artist floating above the high buildings in the night sky. Back to supporters like Cuervo, who had said, “I can tell you what you want to know about yourself. Let me know when you’re ready to hear it.”
PART FOUR
25
1984
Winifred Darden would say, “The secret acronym for Lovegood’s extraordinary endowment fund is ‘G.E.T.’ As in ‘get.’ Gratitude, Enclosure, and Tradition. When Lovegood found a place for me, the Dardens, freed of their burden, pooled their resources and contributed abundantly. When girls leave and make something of themselves, they and their kin generously remember Lovegood.
“Now, Enclosure is somewhat suspect these days. But it’s absolutely crucial to the mix, because parents still want it. To know your daughters are safely ‘removed from strife / where they may seek the mental life,’ to quote from our pageant song. Or to put it a different way, think of that infamous fraternity song about dating prospects, whose naughty first two lines concerning the rival colleges in town are followed by ‘And LOVE good girls.’
“As for Tradition, that’s our ace in the hole. It’s like our Doric columns: a classic emblem for donors.”
During Susan Fox’s early-morning walks across Lovegood’s campus, which under her leadership had expanded to twice its size, the late Winifred Darden’s informative voice with its gentle humor often kept her company. How wrong she had been upon meeting the dorm mistress, a walking compendium of Lovegood’s past, and thinking, oh dear, I’ll have to fight this one every step of the way to get anything new done!
Susan Fox dressed for her early walks, and waking students looking out their windows could follow the constitutional of the Dean Emeri
ta, clad in a shawl in cool weather, a cape in winter, a light jacket on the warm mornings.
For the first time since the World War II years, Lovegood College had empty rooms. It was losing prospective students to the four-year womens’ colleges in the state. Four-year status must come soon now, and even the die-hard traditionalists were coming around. It is high time, thought the dean, that Lovegood was holding its first baccalaureate ceremony on the lawn. Girls—women!—of twenty-one wearing the green gowns and receiving their diploma from the new president. Who was hardly new anymore, having arrived in 1977.
If anyone had asked her, she could have suggested which new building should be the junior residence hall and which the senior. Regarding suggestions, one must be judicious and wait until one is asked. When the old board members had been planning her on-site retirement, one of them had said, half in jest, “You’ll be sort of like the queen.” After she found herself with the leisure to read books again, she had looked into both Elizabeths, the present one fourteen years her junior, and found they had vastly more influence.
And then there was the step after that. Vassar College had opened its doors to men in 1969, while she was still dean. That would mean some interior renovations in Lovegood’s bathrooms. Again, wait until one is asked. And when and if one is, the term is urinals.
Winifred Darden had been alive when the talk of the dean’s “queenship” was in the works.
