Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  “Then I took a side path into the woods and found the Jellicoe family cemetery. But Merry, I was a little shocked to see you’ve already put in the stone for yourself.”

  “That’s what happens when you work in a funeral home. You learn to think of funeral directives like you would your grocery list.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve made your grocery list.”

  “During the melanoma scare, I did—right down to the hymns and the readings. All the members of my Bible study group have made their funeral directives. Rachel Blake will play Lovegood’s processional hymn. You know she was offered a music scholarship to Converse for her last two years, but she chose to stay at Lovegood and graduate with her friends.”

  “She was a real help with my reading tomorrow. Keep it even and unemotional, let the words carry the feeling. Honestly, when you meet people like Rachel, you can’t be too much of an old woebegoner about the future. Their spirits seem less … knotted. I’ve got one in my life, Josie Maglia, a young filmmaker who’s taken a two-year option on Mr. Blue. She’s been after me to write the screenplay, but during my refreshing walk around your land I realized writing a screenplay for Mr. Blue was the last thing I wanted to do.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to let it go. My motive was skewed from the start. I was out to repeat my success with Beast and Beauty. But Beast and Beauty had a firm foundation. Its key idea was that Beauty can love Beast as long as she doesn’t go outside with him, and I built the story around that.”

  “It was exactly right.”

  “But with Mr. Blue, I wanted to set myself an impressive challenge. I know, I said, I’ll turn the Bluebeard story upside down. I’ll create a female Bluebeard. She’ll be the one in control. She has the property and the power. She has all the keys. She can make the rules and punish. I started her off as a bossy eight-year-old opening the door to a stranger who has come to work for her dying father. Right away, the little girl asserts her power by making him wait and closing the door in his face. And for a while, the chapters sped along. She grows into a young woman and keeps setting herself new ways to keep him in his place. And he works skillfully and hard, determined to make her acknowledge his worth. Finally she marries him because belonging to her ancestral land is more important to her than anything else, so why not share the burden with him? But she keeps one place for herself that he must never enter. And he obeys! She becomes so sure he will not betray her that she no longer locks the door. Though Joachim Maglia made that wonderful painting of a big gothic lock. Well, so far so good. Beast and Beauty was 150 pages. I was already on page 118. My editor liked what he had read and commissioned Joachim to illustrate it. Joachim was Josie’s twin brother. She shot a film that documented his work as an artist while he was dying. The work part was shot in color and the disease part in black and white. Very minimal dialogue. She called it Brother Death: An AIDS Elegy. It won several awards at film festivals.

  “My editor said he was waiting with bated breath to see how I was going to resolve my audacious feat, as he called it. Well, it was like he put an evil spell on it. How indeed was I going to turn her into a female Bluebeard? She has no secret. She hasn’t murdered anybody. She’s tested his loyalty, and he has passed the test. So she gets pregnant and dies in childbirth, the good old-fashioned way. Females who assert themselves too much have to die. Naturally she has insisted on a home birth, to keep everything inside her fiefdom, as Miss McCorkle would call it. I was whining to Cuervo about my failure, and he said why don’t you write it over again. But who would publish it, I said. And he gave me this maxim that sometimes artists have to choose between the work and the sponsor.”

  “The sponsor?”

  “The sponsor, he said, was anything outside the work that underwrites or influences it. You have to break free and walk away from the sponsor. A sponsor can be anything from publisher to editor to critic to reader. Cuervo believed that a book’s need to exist should be enough. Maybe that’s why he never wrote a second book. Anyway, that’s my sad story of my misbegotten Mr. Blue.”

  “I think I know what her secret was.”

  “You do?”

  “She’s fallen in love with him. But she thinks she would lose her power if she let him know.”

  “I never even considered that! That forbidden room, by the way, is from that story you told me at Lovegood about your mother’s secret room, where she put herself together again.”

  “I sort of guessed that,” Merry said and chose not to elaborate. “But there’s a conclusion to my story, too. More of a nonconclusion. The day after our parents were killed, Ritchie came to my room and said we had to go up to the secret room right away. He was convinced that she was in there. So I played along, but guess what?”

  “What?”

  “It was completely stripped. The chair, the table, Mr. Jack had cleared it out. He said he was only trying to make things easier for us, but Ritchie screamed and called him horrible names. Eventually he cried himself to sleep, but I don’t think he ever forgave Jack. Did you see little Paul’s stone in the cemetery?”

  “How could I miss it? His name followed by those dates wrenches your heart. I wanted to leave something beside his grave, so I looked around and found an unusual pinkish stone. It was shaped sort of like an arrowhead.”

  “It was an arrowhead! You must have found one of Ritchie’s sacrificed collection. When he was ten, he developed this passion for the Coree Indians, who settled near the Neuse River, where we had lunch. He did a school project on them—by the eighteenth century they were extinct. Then he branched out and got interested in all the eastern North Carolina tribes, and he reached deep enough to get really incensed by how they were treated. ‘I mean, it was their land, they were here first …’ and one day in a fit of grief he buried his entire arrow collection in the family cemetery. Where did you find your pink stone?”

  “It was over in the old section, by a Jellicoe who had served in the navy in the War of 1812. I thought how fortunate you were to know where you came from so far back. Uncle Rowan provided me with some forebears in the Pullen cemetery, but nothing like your spread.”

  Feron was here in this house. Only now it was the next morning and Merry smelled the coffee she had been planning to bring to Feron in bed.

  Merry had said goodnight and gone up to her room, counting on having time to steep in all that had passed between them, but then she had given in and chucked down one of the doctor’s pain pills in case her scooped-out nose were to give her trouble at night. That, added to the wine, had knocked her out.

  She went to the window. Down below was Feron with a coffee mug, sitting on the edge of the porch. Over her pajamas she wore Ritchie’s blue air force blanket wrapped around her like a shawl.

  Merry slipped a sweater over her nightgown, changed the band-aid, and hurried downstairs.

  “Oh Feron, I was planning to bring you coffee in bed.”

  “I’ve been up for a while. I had this dream, I’m not sure what it was. Whether I was asleep or I dreamed I was asleep. I realized I was being watched by someone in the room. I thought to myself, if I open my eyes I’ll wake up. So I opened my eyes, and there was this figure sitting on Ritchie’s footlocker. I could tell it was a man, but it was so blurry I hardly saw him. He was trying to speak to me, but it faded in and out like voices do when you’re scanning radio stations. The only thing I could make out was ‘five black barns,’ and he kept calling me by some name that sounded like ‘Errol.’ Then light started filling the room, and he dissolved. All that was left on top of the footlocker was the black trilby I’m going to wear to Blanche’s funeral today.”

  43

  “We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption …”

  Reading Blanche’s assigned passages from the lectern of St. Athanasius Church, Feron was feeling less and less like her usual self. Whe
ther this was an agreeable or an ominous occurrence she couldn’t tell, because she had never felt this way before. Whichever it was, it would have to wait, because her main purpose was to get through this reading without failure in any of its many forms.

  Since the dawn appearance of the man on Ritchie’s footlocker, she had felt both light-headed and spacious. Her mind could hold more things at once, but a precarious floatiness was part of the experience.

  For instance, having read aloud the verses ending with “adoption,” she grasped clearly that she had undergone adoption when Uncle Rowan took her in and she had gone to live under Blanche’s roof. Henceforth, she would never be the same. She could never go back to being “the old Feron” again. As she moved through her reading, sticking close to Rachel’s advice to “let the words carry the feeling,” she saw—not a visual manifestation, like the blurred man on the footlocker, but vivid portraits of Rowan and Blanche on her inward eye.

  That wasn’t all. She looked out at the congregation. “A sea of faces” still held up well for a cliché. She saw Merry, leaning Cousin Thad’s way. Not touching, just … and she saw rangy Thad folding himself into a closer curve to guard the space of “the sublime little lady in the black hat.”

  Of course. Anyone could see it. If they observe as I am observing now.

  Had she stumbled into a higher level of perception—or was she on the verge of a stroke?

  “Now hope that sees for itself is not hope. For who hopes for what one sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait with endurance.”

  Please get me through the rest of this funeral and then the ride to the Benton Grange cemetery, and the burial, and there’s not going to be enough time for the reception. And after that, the drive to the airport with Merry for the return flight to Newark and then the taxi through the tunnel and, if the elevator is still out of order, the five flights of stairs to the beach house on Christopher Street. Once you’re safely there, and lying down, you may inquire further into this.

  The funeral had started late, past eleven, and it was ten past one before they left the church. It was almost quarter to two by the time everybody got into their cars to follow the hearse to Benton Grange cemetery, where Blanche would join her parents and grandparents. If Blanche had married Uncle Rowan, would she be going to the Pullen cemetery to join the Hoods? Or not?

  Merry was saying the Roman rites had been impressive, something entirely different from Ezekiel’s services. “At Ezekiel, it’s more like we’re all lifting one another up, rather than the priest dispensing everything from above. I don’t mean to sound critical. Your reading was beautiful, Feron. You looked elegant as you stood up there. I was so proud of you. The next time it’s my turn to choose the reading for our Bible study group I’m going to suggest Romans eight.”

  Blanche’s coffin was lowered into its hole by a cranking device turned solemnly by someone on the funeral staff. Going down with her was a sumptuous spray of white lilies and roses “from all of us in the Hood family,” sent by Cousin Thad in disobedience to Blanche’s “in lieu of flowers” stipulation in her obituary.

  Uncle Rowan’s coffin had gone down the old-fashioned way, six red-faced, straining pallbearers inching it down with straps.

  After the crank had been unscrewed and the rest of the lowering equipment discreetly carried away, the priest uttered the words of committal and produced a stream of loose black soil from his lacy sleeve.

  Everyone waited. Thad nudged Feron. “They’re waiting for you to go first. Grab a handful of dirt from that pile and throw it down on the coffin.”

  Afterward, a handsome lady approached Feron.

  “Marguerite Steed! How wonderful you look.”

  “Thank you, Feron. Daddy died late last year. He almost made it to a hundred.”

  “Blanche told me in a letter. You must miss him.”

  “I do, but he’s still very much around. I have lost forty-five pounds. This summer I plan to travel. I have invitations from doll collectors all over the world. My first stop is Tel Aviv to see an exhibit of Israeli folklore dolls. I’m staying with relatives of Edith Samuel. I once wrote her a fan letter, and she responded. Her dolls are mostly in museums now. Of course she died back in the sixties.”

  “Do you know, Marguerite, I wanted to send you a doll once. Actually a pair of dolls: a rat in formal dress riding a horse in a Madison Avenue shop window. It was called ‘Rat Race,’ and priced at twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “What a kind thought. If I’d had the money when Edith Samuel was still making dolls, I would have spent all of my savings on one of her forlorn little émigré dolls. Feron, your Aunt Blanche was a great-hearted soul. She left her world much better than she found it.”

  44

  Standing between Feron and Cousin Thad, Merry was remembering funerals in her life. Mother and Daddy, Ritchie, little Paul. Oh, and Feron’s Uncle Rowan. And Sister Simone’s twenty-four-year-old grandson who fell off a roof of a house he was shingling. And, of course, Jack.

  Desire had been between them, well, not from the beginning, but after the deed was done and Jack had plunged into self-castigation. He would never forgive himself. But then the months passed, and while working together outdoors, she saw him glance at her and she felt something. Although they stayed apart for two years, she thought of him as hers. Then Ritchie went off on a camping trip, and they fell into bed. Then his remorse again and her shame, which kept them apart until Ritchie left for the air force. His death drove them into their separate corners of self-reproach. Until they abandoned all pretense and got together as often as they wanted. And after the 1979 harvest was in and they were congratulating themselves, she said, “Mr. Jack, would you ever consider marrying?” “Marrying? Who?” He had looked completely bewildered. “Well, me,” she said. “Merry Grace.”

  Cousin Thad was telling Feron he had an ideal tenant for her house if she would agree to a three-year contract. “I can vouch for this person. Your property couldn’t be in safer hands. Of course, we’d put in a cancellation clause for if you change your mind. It’s my son, Simon. He’s been promoted by his Raleigh bank, and he’s planning on getting married. Think about it, and we’ll talk numbers when we get to the reception.”

  “Thad, I’m not going to the reception. I get antsy if I have to worry about missing my flight.”

  “Oh, no! But your flight’s not till almost five!”

  “And now it’s almost three. And it’s more than an hour’s drive from here. Your son can rent the house and bring his bride there if he wants. We can work out the numbers over the phone when I get back to New York.”

  “If you’ll pick up!”

  “I did when you called about Blanche.”

  Cousin Thad’s disappointment had showed too much when Feron said they were skipping the reception. If Merry worried about anything, it was Thad’s openly loving her with his looks and gestures when others were around. In church today she kept having to slip out of his inadvertent nearness.

  She and Jack had made all they could of their marriage. Until the night of Paul’s death, she had never felt anguish. Until the night of “too much information” seven years ago, after Jack thought she was her mother, she had not wished anything had been different. Their marriage was all it could be.

  It was the undreamed-of love that came after that had thrown her for a loop. It didn’t surprise her that some kind of suffering should accompany this love. It seemed right that there should be a price. The new love came weighted with the knowledge of all she could lose. Being so high meant farther to fall. “What if I lose it?” always goes with the undreamed-of gift.

  “Life would be awful without you in it” each had told the other on the night it began.

  “Poor old Thad,” Feron commented from the passenger seat. “He was counting on seeing you at the reception. It was all over his face. It must be nice to have a courtly lover. I was sorry to drag you away, but it would have been cutting it too close.”

  “I do
n’t mind. I hate having to rush, myself.” The flippant courtly lover remark meant that Feron was no wiser.

  “Uncle Rowan always insisted on waiting with me at my gate. I told him it wasn’t necessary, but he said he wanted to. So we would both sit there nervously, making polite conversation. There was no talking him out of it.”

  Merry had been planning to wait with at the gate with Feron, but Feron was sending her a pretty transparent message.

  “Oh, I should return Ritchie’s hat. Shall I just sail it into the backseat?”

  “You looked great in it, Feron. Listen, I have to tell you something. That day you were supposed to come visit us in 1958? Ritchie was helping me make up my bed for you so you could have a view of the apple orchards and not our five black barns. I was afraid they would depress you, but Ritchie thought they were beautiful and was looking forward to telling you why we painted them black. To hold in the heat and give the leaves that famous Jellicoe crackle. And you said this morning he kept calling you something that sounded like ‘Errol.’ Well, he said, that day you didn’t come, your name sounded like ‘Feral,’ and he teased that he was going to call you that.”

  “You think—?”

  “I do. You have a sense of the beyond that I just don’t, Feron. All these years I’ve been going into his room longing to see him again, and all you had to do was open your eyes and there he was sitting on his footlocker.”

  “If you want to know the truth, I did feel spooked. It was on an entirely different plane than what I have with Cuervo. I talk to Cuervo and ask him questions. But I knew Cuervo so well that I can think his afterlife-thoughts in safety. There’s not that head-on collision with something I know comes from outside the range of what I can control. I’m wondering if that apparition had anything to do with the strange way I was feeling while up at the lectern.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “It was peculiar. I had this floaty feeling. I couldn’t tell if it was going to turn into something good or bad—you know, like they say people about to have an epileptic fit are extra lucid. Or I thought maybe a stroke was coming.”