Flora

by Gail Godwin

  Who knows what she would have blurted next if I hadn’t asked Finn where he had learned to draw like that.

  “Oh, it was just this thing I started doing after I came to America. Bill liked me to draw scenes from Ireland. He had left as a baby and couldn’t remember anything. And I drew the men in my company, each with some personal military object, like his helmet hanging on the wall, so they could send home war portraits of themselves.”

  “You can do people, too?” marveled Flora.

  “Surely I can. Will I draw the two of you?” (That funny “will” of his again.) “How about the two of you sitting side by side on the sofa?”

  “No, just draw Helen. She’ll like it better if I’m not in it,” Flora told him without the slightest hint of rancor. I can still hear her saying those words.

  “Maybe I should sit over there in my grandmother’s chair,” I said.

  “You get to know a person when you draw them,” Finn commented after he had laid in a few strokes, interspersed by quick glances. He scrutinized me the way he had the furniture. Sitting close beside him, Flora squeaked encouraging little mmms, which seemed to be more about the drawing than about me. Once she said, “Oh!”

  “What?” I said.

  “He got that look of yours when you’re—”

  “When I’m what?”

  “Keep still,” Finn commanded.

  “Can’t I even speak?”

  “You can speak if you don’t change your expression or move your mouth.”

  “How do you get to know a person when you draw them?”

  “You catch some of their passing thoughts,” he said. “Now, do ye think you can keep your face still and just lift one hand out of your lap and lay it on the arm of the chair?”

  “Which hand?”

  “The right … no, I mean your left. So it’ll be the one on my right. Now unclench your fingers and let them hang loose over the edge of the chair, and would it be too much to ask you to lose the frown? Good girl.”

  THE YOUNG EX-SOLDIER’S pointy face, sharp nose elongated by the shadows of the lamp-lit room, made him look like a skinny magician growing out of a myth as he drew the frowning girl-child self-importantly arranged in her late grandmother’s wing chair. I made much of the shadows and the history of that shabby room in “Impediments,” the title story in a collection of stories about failed loves. In the story, the young man is awed to be in the house and he is trying to impress the young woman sitting beside him by drawing her grumpy little cousin. He is deeply attracted to the young woman, she is different from the usual pretty girl, she has a natural, unspoiled warmth and an endearing determination to make you feel appreciated. But the young woman goes away at the end of the summer and the soldier is left with his unrequited love. Yet this evening of lamplight and shadows in the arrogant, crumbling old house on top of a mountain will serve him all his life as a source of his art. It, more than any other source, is responsible for the elegiac, “lost,” overlay that haunts his canvases and wins him fame and fortune. Years later, he sees a frowning woman sitting in a wing chair across a crowded room. She is balancing a glass of champagne rather primly on her lap and staring into a space that seems far from this room. The vision instantly fires up in him the old, trusted elegiac spark and he goes over to her and says, “I’d like to sketch you, just as you are, in that chair.” And she comes back from whatever faraway place she has been in and looks at him closely and says, “But you already have.” He thinks she is speaking symbolically or trying to charm him by being mysterious. But she lets him sketch her, just as she is, balancing her glass of champagne primly on her knees. Soon a crowd has gathered around the wing chair: who can resist the spectacle of a famous artist on one knee in front of a chair, sketching an unknown woman? He says, “You are a very good model. You keep still, but you don’t hide the flow of your thoughts.” She responds with a distant half smile. He signs the drawing and offers it to her, but she says, “No, keep it to remember me by,” and stands up, puts down her undrunk champagne, and walks out of the party. The reader knows that she has loved him since she was ten and has measured all men since then by his memory. But she has also, over the span of years, grown into her father’s cynicism and is hardened enough not to try for a belated romantic ending.

  XV.

  I was helping to strip Nonie’s bed. It was the day of the week I felt sanest. Mrs. Jones had known the Recoverers and Doctor Cam and my father when he was sixteen and the elusive Lisbeth. She knew what I had lost in Nonie. Her Tuesday appearances attached me to my old world.

  Each week she took away bundles and the following week she brought back separate flat packages labeled by room. Each piece was marked in India ink so the laundry would know which room it belonged to when they made up the packages. Nonie’s linens were marked MASTER; Flora’s were marked FANNING. My father’s were marked HIGHSMITH.

  “I reckon I’ll be going to those fireworks tomorrow night they’re having down at the lake,” said Mrs. Jones.

  “But you hate fireworks.”

  “Not hate. It’s just them going off unexpectedly makes me jump. But this time I’m going for that little girl who died from polio. It was Rosemary’s idea.”

  I waited the way Mrs. Jones had shown me how to wait when we were beginning this kind of conversation.

  “Rosemary always was one for remembrances. She loved little ceremonies. For people who had passed or for a neighbor’s pet. I woke straight out of sleep and she was saying clear as anything, ‘Mamma, go down to the lake on the Fourth and every time a pretty firework goes up in the night sky say “Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten.”’ That was the little girl’s name. It was in the paper. She was from Georgia. Her aunt was driving her to camp. It was so hot, the aunt said, and they saw this lake and decided to stop there for a swim.”

  “You’ll go all by yourself at night?”

  “I usually am all by myself.”

  “I wish I could go with you.”

  “That would be nice. But you have to mind your father. He has his reasons.”

  “I can’t wait till school starts, even if all my friends are gone.”

  “You’ll make new friends. How are you liking that library book I brought?”

  “Oh, it was fine.”

  “You already finished it?”

  “There’s not a lot to do up here.”

  I was prepared for some discussion of the book about the traveling doll to back up my lie, but Mrs. Jones simply nodded and said she’d take it back and bring me another one next Tuesday. “Maybe this time she’ll have one of those in that series you like.”

  “We had someone to dinner on Sunday,” I told her.

  “That was a change for you.”

  “It was only that Finn who delivers our groceries. But Flora thought we should ask him.”

  “Was it nice?”

  “Yes, but I ate too much. Nonie never made such huge meals. After dinner, he drew a picture of our living room to send to his mother. And he drew this portrait of me.” I got it out of the top drawer of Nonie’s dressing table to show.

  “Why, it’s good enough to frame.”

  “Do you think it looks like me?”

  “Well, it makes you look older, but they’re your features and you look that way when you’re … pondering something. Why weren’t you wearing your nice dress?”

  “Oh, it seemed too formal,” I said. For an extra reason I almost added that he was only the person who delivered the groceries, but I stopped myself in time. What if Mrs. Jones were to think I wouldn’t have dressed up for her, either, as she was only the person who cleaned the house? I was going to have to be more careful of people’s feelings. I had lost enough friends.

  The outgrown dress was back on its hanger in the closet, a little rumpled from its punishment on the floor, but looking like any dress waiting to be put on again.

  AS JULY BEGAN to crawl forward, I fantasized that my father would show up for my birthday in early August, even though i
t would fall on a Tuesday this year. He wouldn’t announce it in his postcards, the latest being of a black bear and her cub standing in a meadow (“Greetings from the Great Smoky Mts. Nat’l. Park”) with its less than satisfying message: “Thought you and Flora would like these two, whose ancestors were among our state’s first settlers. Lots of construction going on here. Will phone soon.” He wouldn’t hint at it in a phone call, either. His car would just drive up sometime around the middle of the seventh, raising a cloud of dust and … what would he do then? I couldn’t recall very well what he had done in former years, because Nonie always did so much. She treated the day like a national holiday. Last year, for my tenth birthday, a huge gift-wrapped box waited on the dining table all through the day while Nonie and I went to lunch at the Downtown Cafeteria and then to a wonderful Gene Tierney movie in which she fools people into thinking she’s been murdered. Afterward Nonie drove us out to the Recreation Park, where we both rode the merry-go-round and had ice cream sundaes. When we returned to the house I opened her presents, but we left the big package on the table for when my father got home because it was supposed to be from him, though I knew she had probably chosen it and wrapped it herself.

  It was dusk when my father finally came in and made himself a tall Jack Daniel’s. When I opened the package and thanked him he raised his eyebrows at the white Samsonite suitcase with my initials, H.D.A., in gold and said, “Ah, now you’re one of us.”

  At first I thought he meant because my initials were the same as theirs, Honora Drake Anstruther’s and Harry Drake Anstruther’s.

  But then he added, “Now you can run away.”

  “Why would I want to run away?”

  “Oh,” he said, smiling into his glass, “it seems to run in the family. Doesn’t it, Mother?”

  It was later that evening, after supper, when he had refreshed his drink and stumbled up to bed, that Nonie told me the fullest version yet of Harry’s running away at sixteen with Willow Fanning.

  (“It was a sad thing, darling. She tricked him because she wanted a man to travel with her. By then Harry had his full growth and looked more like twenty than sixteen. And then, when they got to where she wanted to go, she dumped him. He caught polio coming home on the bus. At least she had paid his fare.”

  “Where did she want to go?”

  “To meet up with another man.”

  “But how did she trick my father?”

  “By making him think she adored him. Young men are pushovers for coquettes. And an invalid coquette is hard to resist. I often worried she’d ruined all women for Harry. But then your mother came along, the very opposite of a coquette.”)

  FLORA GOT ALL the mail. Packages from the school where she would teach fifth grade. Today she had a letter from a teacher at her school who said he would be glad to teach her how to drive so she wouldn’t need to be dependent on the bus.

  “That’s very kind of him, now all I need is a car,” remarked Flora, but so good-naturedly it could not qualify as sarcasm. “He was right nice, he was on the committee that hired me. Who knows, Helen? Maybe I’ll follow in your mother’s footsteps.”

  I knew where this was going and did not respond.

  No week went by without a letter of several pages (on both sides) from the faithful Juliet Parker. (“She says the blight got the first tomatoes but luckily there was still time to replant … Oh! Uncle Sam and Aunt Garnet are going to wait until I’m back for their remarriage ceremony, isn’t that sweet?”)

  And then one day Flora looked up beaming from Juliet’s latest letter and announced, as if a prize were being bestowed on both of us, that “they” would so much like it if Flora could send them a recent picture of “Lisbeth’s girl.”

  “There aren’t any,” I said.

  “But surely—didn’t you and Rachel Huff snap pictures of each other? No? Well, I’m sure we can find something recent. How about a school picture?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No school picture?”

  “Just no. Not that I can send down there. I don’t want my picture passed around by people I don’t even know.”

  Flora’s face went through some drastic changes before she turned her back on me. I thought she might be cranking up for a crying spree, but then, still turned away, her voice, cold and dry, said, “You sound exactly like her.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like Lisbeth when she was being cruel.”

  “Cruel how?”

  Flora heaved a great sigh and made as if to throw herself forward into some kitchen project for next meal.

  “Cruel how?”

  “That’s enough said. It’s more than enough.”

  “You can’t just stop there.”

  “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “You’ve got to tell me or you’ll be cruel.”

  Flora turned around and treated me to what was for her a scathing once-over. “One time—it was your comment about your snapshot that reminded me of it—she went into the family album and cut herself out of the picture of all of us Daddy had taken with his new camera. Just scissored it out with manicure scissors and put the picture back in the album. It wasn’t discovered till much later and Daddy asked her why she had done it.”

  “What did she say?” I could not imagine myself doing such an extreme thing, though I was thrilled by it.

  “She said it was because she looked particularly nice in that shot and she wanted to have just a picture of herself without the rest of us around.”

  “That’s not exactly cruel.”

  “Oh, there were other— No, I’ve said enough. I’ve said too much. It’s just that you were so like her when you said, ‘Not that I can send down there.’ Like it was beneath you. And yet you were hardly three when she died. She wouldn’t have had enough time to turn you against us.”

  “Why should she want to turn me against people I didn’t even know?”

  “Because we weren’t the kind of people she could be proud of. Sometimes at night when I would wake up and throw my leg over her to make sure she was still there, she would get mad and say mean things. Oh, this has gone beyond far enough, Helen. Now go away and put it out of your mind.” Again she turned toward some kitchen duty that could save her.

  “You might as well tell me what she said, because I’m not going away. You’re stuck with me until the end of the summer.”

  “I didn’t mean for you to go away, Helen, I only meant—”

  “She would get mad and say what mean things?”

  “Oh, that my mother was trash and Daddy got left holding a package that wasn’t his, and how her father had been the only brother smart enough to leave the state and better himself, but then along came the influenza and dumped her right back to start all over with the people her father had struggled to get away from. When she was a little girl, she said, she used to lie awake in Florida and hear her father and mother make fun of them back in Alabama, imitating their accents. Her father had worked hard to get rid of his. Both he and her mother had acting ambitions. Now, aren’t you sorry you made me tell you such things?”

  “Not really.” I was elated rather than sorry. Flora had given me two vivid snapshots of the woman I couldn’t remember.

  AFTER FLORA’S EXPLOSION, or the nearest she had ever come to one, I felt things between us had seriously shifted. If I was going to get through the rest of the summer successfully (rather than abjectly), I was going to need new tactics.

  In the daytime, walking around the house and its dilapidated grounds, or lurking on the Recoverers’ porch on my father’s side pretending to read a book while I waited for opportunities to steal across the hall and plunder Flora’s drawer for the next letter, I forced myself toward a subtler kind of thinking. Sometimes I was sure I could actually feel my brain stretching to make room for more intricate and convoluted paths. Not just stopping at the first old I-am-furious-so-I’ll-lash-out point, but letting it branch and divide into other possibilities. I could lash out and make her cry and
get some instant satisfaction, or I could hold back and see what benefits came from my holding back.

  After Flora’s outburst I went away and checked myself over for wounds and then added up the pluses and minuses. What was lost was that I now knew Flora didn’t adore my mother as much I had thought, but so what? How important was it that someone like Flora should adore my mother? What had been found were some valuable pointers to what Lisbeth really was like, and out of that finding branched another: that I saw myself not only capable but willing to behave as my mother had behaved under the circumstances. No, Lisbeth herself had not lived long enough to “turn me against them,” but poor Flora in her anguished disclosures had certainly made some headway. To the deplorable list of a father shot between the eyes during a poker game and a live-in Negro maid who owned half the house were now added a trashy mother and a father left holding a package that wasn’t his.

  However, I was stuck with Flora for the rest of July and most of August. “You’re stuck with me!” I had shouted at her and rendered her instantly on the defensive. Being stuck with Flora, how could I make the most of my stuckness?

  For a start, there were still those unread letters from Nonie in Flora’s drawer. I needed to find more reasons to be upstairs during the times while Flora was safely occupied downstairs. And what else could be wrested from this jail sentence with Flora? Well, I could squeeze more out of her about my mother. This would require a more subversive approach because, guilt-ridden over her loss of control, Flora was on guard against it happening again.

  I worked on these things during my pitiful daytime rounds of our house and in bed at night, burrowing into Nonie’s sheets and hoping for further instructions from her. Her high-shouldered black purse (faithfully gone over with a cloth every Tuesday by Mrs. Jones) watched over me from its same spot atop the dresser. Her Easter hat lay in its tissues storing up its powers for those extreme situations when I would be driven to put it on again and angle myself just right in the mirror so I could evoke the back of her head.