Flora

by Gail Godwin

  “Please, sir!” cried Flora. “There’s a child present. Her father is off doing important war work in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and it will be fixed as soon as he returns next month.” She began to cry softly and also the driver had heard of Oak Ridge, and he and the driver of the tow truck ended up fashioning a makeshift bridge of planks over the rut and gratefully accepting coffee and hot corn bread from Flora in the kitchen before they left.

  Then the downspout that had been hanging tipsily sideways from the gutter fell down across the lawn—or former lawn.

  “Oh, dear,” moaned Flora, “we’ll have to get someone.”

  “Leave it till my father gets back,” I said. I didn’t say that I was hoping he might surprise us and show up for my birthday, which was a little over a week away.

  “Well, I don’t know, honey. Nobody likes to come home and see pieces of their house all over the ground. It looks like someone hasn’t been taking care of things.”

  “It’s just one piece, and you can’t even see it when you drive up. You’re only supposed to be taking care of me, not the house.”

  But Flora decided to phone Mr. Crump at Grove Market, to ask if he knew of a “reasonable” carpenter, and Finn answered and said he could do it if we had a ladder, which we did. He asked if it could wait until the weekend and Flora said it could and thanked him too profusely.

  Then the toilet in the Willow Fanning half bath got clogged, and Flora cried and said now everyone would blame her for flushing something down it when she hadn’t. She phoned the plumber listed in Nonie’s little “Majordomo” book, but the number had been disconnected. “And I can’t call Mr. Crump again,” she wailed.

  “Why not? He’s bound to know a plumber.”

  “Because, don’t you see? Finn might answer again and offer to fix it himself when he comes to do the gutter and that would be humiliating.”

  I saw Finn kneeling in front of Flora’s toilet, pulling out something disgusting. It made me want to laugh, but not for long. It would reflect on me, too, and make him not want to live in our house.

  But Flora fetched the plunger and went at the Willow Fanning toilet so violently it choked up an enormous soggy wad, which she insisted on my inspecting. “I want you to see there’s nothing in it but toilet paper. But it’s still my fault, I’ve been using too much. At home, Juliet had this rule: two squares for number one, four for number two, unless it was—”

  “Okay, okay!”

  I SET TO work on my refurbishment of Starling Peake’s old room, which I was already secretly calling the Devlin Patrick Finn room. There wasn’t any deep cleaning to do; Mrs. Jones had been faithful with that. The floor was regularly vacuumed, the windowsills scrubbed, the curtains and bedspread laundered, and the furniture polished—though there was way too much furniture. The two “lesser” Recoverers’ rooms had become repositories for castoffs, like my father’s Persian carpets that had tripped him once too often and twiggy-legged tables and plant stands and framed pictures and mirrors turned to the wall.

  I first thought I’d tell Flora I was fixing up this room for when new friends came to stay over. But I had grown so adept at predicting her responses I could hear her ask why I didn’t put them in my old room downstairs. So instead I told her I wanted to make a study upstairs for myself.

  “But, honey, why that gloomy old room? If you want an upstairs study, why not take your grandfather’s consulting room, with all its nice shelves?”

  “That’s for family trophies and things. And my father goes in there to look things up in books.”

  “Oh, in that case. But wouldn’t the Recoverer’s room across the hall be more cheerful? It gets the morning sun.”

  “I don’t always want to be cheerful. I like gloom, too. Besides, when I get home from school it will be the afternoon.”

  “That’s true,” she conceded.

  “I just have a feeling about that room. I like it.”

  “I wonder if—?”

  “What?”

  “Your mother kept her clothes in the big old wardrobe in there. I remember going in and sniffing them after her funeral. There was still her scent. Maybe rooms can—Oh, I don’t know, honey. It’s your house and you can pick whichever room you want. I should learn to keep my big mouth shut.”

  IN STARLING PEAKE’S old room was a hulking old cheval dresser with a tilting mirror. Its drawers were crammed with the saddest detritus you could imagine. Each item must once have had a purpose but now gave up its history to a meaningless mound of junk. The prospect of emptying the drawers was so depressing I decided to wait for Mrs. Jones.

  “What do you want to do with all this?” she asked, after a grim survey.

  “I want it not to be in there.”

  This prompted one of her rare closed-mouthed laughs. “Let’s take it out, then, and lay it down on a cloth. You can go over it better that way.”

  “One drawer at a time, or all three?”

  “Oh, let’s get it all out.” She made it sound like a daring proposal.

  She found an old quilt in the wardrobe and spread it out on the bed.

  “Flora said my mother used to keep her clothes in that wardrobe.”

  “She did. There wasn’t enough room in your father’s closet.”

  “I wonder where they went.”

  “Your grandmother gave them away. I helped her box them up. It was hard for her. She set great store by Miss Lisbeth.”

  “Do you remember my mother?”

  “Well, naturally I do.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “She was always very nice to me. I didn’t see much of her because she was at the high school all day with your father. The only time I got to know her a little was the spring and summer she was expecting you. She would rest on the bed in here sometimes.”

  “In this room?”

  “She said it was cooler and she liked being out of everybody’s way. When I was going over the room we would talk.”

  “What about?”

  “Oh, she asked what it was like when I was expecting Rosemary and if I had been as big and felt as awkward in my final months. I told her I had a much bigger frame than her and could carry the extra weight better and that I had been born awkward. This cheered her up. Usually she had a book or two on the bed with her. If she was reading we didn’t talk, unless she spoke first.”

  “What kind of books?”

  “Schoolbooks. She couldn’t wait to go back to her teaching. One time she read a poem to me about a lady who had to stay in a room with her back to the window. She couldn’t look out directly or she would bring down some kind of curse, but she rigged a mirror so she could see the reflection of the road below and could watch life going on through the mirror.”

  “What was that poem?”

  “I don’t rightly recall, but I do remember her saying this room was like it because you could look out the window and see the road down below, only she didn’t have to use a mirror.”

  “But how could she see the road from the bed?”

  “The bed was over by the window, then. You could lie on it and look down through the trees and see Sunset Drive. It’s all blocked in now, but you could still see the road back then.”

  Checker pieces with no board—a perfume atomizer—a rusty harmonica with dust in the holes—a shaving brush with stiff bristles—a crudely carved wooden giraffe with its broken neck glued back on—empty gift boxes and folded Christmas wrapping paper—string and ribbons—a cloudy magnifying glass—a tarnished sugar spoon with something crusty in its bowl—a cutglass bottle of dried-out smelling salts—an empty tin of Sears, Roebuck gunpowder tea filled with rubber bands and paper clips—pen nibs and pencil stubs—boxes of rifle cartridges—a small square porcelain dish with a scene of trees and a lake and HANDPAINTED IN NIPPON written on the bottom—a used elastic bandage—an ivory cigarette holder—a silk sleeping mask—a guide to palmistry with the cover torn off—an extension cord—two buckeyes—a silver flask (no monogram) without its
top—a rubber stem syringe with a red bulb—an empty box that said: “German Liquor Cure: 24 doses”—a sealed pack of playing cards—a Standard Accident Insurance Company of Detroit date book for 1923 with “nb” faithfully recorded in pencil for every day in the month of January, followed by empty pages for the rest of the year—a small tarnished silver tray stuffed inside a wad of tissue and brown paper; on the tray was engraved the profile of a bird and ALABAMA, THE YELLOWHAMMER STATE.

  “I’d go over each item with a damp cloth before you lay it out on the bed,” Mrs. Jones had suggested before leaving. “If there’s things you’re not sure what to do with, we can look those over when I come next week.”

  The sorting-out part took longer than I expected. There were things I knew I shouldn’t throw out, even though I wanted them out of the room. There were some puzzling objects that I wanted to look at some more before I consigned them to the trash. And there were a few things that might be of use to Finn: the extension cord and the sealed pack of cards, and the buck-eyes for good luck—I could tell him about the local legends if he didn’t know them. But he definitely wouldn’t want someone’s disgusting old shaving brush or a flask with no top, or even if it had a top because he was on the dry. Each survivor of the trash I carefully wiped down before placing it on the bed. (Would Finn like to have his bed moved back to the window?)

  When at last I surveyed my final collection on the bed, I ferociously regretted the loss of Annie Rickets.

  (“Oh, boy, let’s get to work. There are different ways we could do this, Helen. We could each take one patient at a time and pick out items for them and then deduce their secrets from their items, or we could go item by item and decide who it belonged to, and then—No, that’s much too infantile for us: my first idea is better. I’ll go first if you let me start with the Willing Fanny. The sleeping mask is definitely hers, and probably the cigarette holder, and she has to have the perfume atomizer, unless one of the male patients was a fairy, and also the smelling salts, and I think she should have the crusted spoon—a ladylike slurp of opium for the long, boring afternoon ahead at Shangri-la. Oh, sorry, I’m taking too many? Okay, you can have the opium spoon back. But I have to insist that syringe is hers, because it’s not the kind you use for enemas, it’s what women use when they need to shoot water and Lysol up inside them. My mammy has one and she says it has kept us from being a family of ten. That date book could be a man’s or a woman’s, so I won’t be greedy. But I’ll bet anything those nb’s stand for either ‘no blood’ or ‘no booze.’ The ‘no booze’ is if they were on the wagon. The other could be either someone who’s missed her period or, more boringly, a former tubercular who’s counting his good days. Breaking off like that could mean they fell off the wagon or got her period or didn’t get it, or, in the case of the tubercular, the blood came back and he expired.”)

  Flora was standing in the doorway. “Supper is ready when you are, honey. Goodness! What is all that?”

  “Junk from the drawers in here.”

  She approached the bed. “It’s not all junk. That’s a perfectly good extension cord, and, look, what a sweet little painted dish—”

  “I know. I’m sorting it out. I just don’t want it in those drawers, in a big clump, where it’s been laying useless for years—”

  “Oh! That’s our calling card tray!”

  “Whose calling card tray?”

  “The one we sent to Lisbeth for a wedding present. Where did you find this, Helen?”

  “I told you. In those drawers.”

  “Just … lying with all the junk?” She scooped it up and cradled it in her palms.

  “No, it had lots of paper around it.”

  “What kind of paper?”

  “Just the brown paper things get mailed in. And there was some tissue paper, too. It was all scrunched up together.”

  “Where is it? Did you throw it away?”

  “Yes, but it’s still in the trash basket over there.”

  Already she was at the basket. “Oh, God, here it is!” Now she was pulling apart the brown paper from the tissue. Such a frenzy over some old wrapping paper. “Oh, I don’t believe this! The card’s still in here!”

  “I didn’t see any card.”

  “Here it is. Oh, my daddy’s own sweet handwriting.” The tears were at the ready. “All of us signed it. See?”

  She proudly showed me the signatures on the card: a younger Flora’s, the bold scrawls of the men, and, familiar to me from her letters to Flora, the proper slant of Juliet Parker.

  “It is sterling silver,” said Flora. “Juliet picked it out, but we all contributed. But why did Lisbeth stuff it away with all that junk? Still in its paper! I wonder if she even saw the card.”

  “Who says it was her? It was probably someone else after she died. They saw it out on a table and said, ‘Oh, what is this for?’ and then put it in the drawer.”

  “No,” said Flora, cradling the little tray like a wounded animal. “It wasn’t ever out on any table. When I stayed here that week after the funeral I looked everywhere. I understand now. I was a fool not to see it before. Lisbeth hated it. She was ashamed of it. Just another piece of Alabama trash.”

  “That is just ridiculous,” I said (though suspecting she might have a point). “You really need to have more faith in yourself, Flora. And if you don’t have it, you at least have to act like you do.”

  “That is exactly what your grandmother would have said,” marveled Flora, regarding me with fond respect.

  “What is a yellowhammer anyway?”

  “Why, it’s our state bird. It’s the sweetest little woodpecker with these bright yellow underwings. Juliet has three yellowhammer boxes in our backyard. My daddy made the boxes for her. They have to be made just so. When the babies fledge, our whole backyard is aflutter with yellow wings.”

  As we went down to supper, I had to congratulate myself for deflecting Flora from her trash talk and staving off those ready tears. There had not been a single tear shed. I felt like a proud parent who, after hard work, sees her child growing into sociability and self-control.

  XXII.

  It was the last Sunday in July. Then there would be next Sunday, and two days after that, August seventh, would be my birthday. My father had not written or phoned since he was having his sandwich and pickle out at that lake. I chose to interpret his silence as meaning that he planned to surprise me by simply showing up on my birthday.

  Today was a sultry, overcast Sunday like the Sunday Flora and I had taken the taxi to church and heard the awful news about Brian. And then Father McFall had driven us home and we hadn’t been down the mountain since.

  But at least it wasn’t raining, which meant that Finn would be coming to fix the gutter in the afternoon.

  Lately I had been composing scenes where my father and Finn would meet, maybe as soon as my birthday. I made myself do it two ways. First I had to imagine my father finding something in Finn to scorn, and then, before I could allow myself to go on, I had to figure out what that thing would be. Finn’s orange spikes had grown out into an acceptable head of hair, he looked less like a wraithlike outsider since he had gotten some sun weeding the old lady’s garden; and the only time he had been really silly was when he had danced for joy at the bottom of the crater, and nobody had seen that but me. Finn was friendly, but not “familiar,” which my father couldn’t stand in people, and he spoke well, even with his funny will we’s and a-tall, a-tall’s. He showed no signs of having been “a mentaler,” the type of person who would escape from a hospital and wrap himself naked around a tree trunk in order to exchange himself for a dead friend.

  Having gone through the negatives and discounted them one by one, I could then move on to the Finn who would catch my father’s interest, charm him, and eventually earn his respect. This was a much pleasanter proposition, and I approached it so well that I kept getting excited and losing my place and having to start over. The consummation point I worked toward in these scenes ended with
the two of them (with myself present, of course) in animated dialogue, each at his best: my father witty and slightly world-weary but without the sarcasm and Finn sweet and caring in his masculine way, without any hints of mental problems. And then Finn would say something, maybe about me, and my father would say, “Look here, why don’t you join forces with us in this crumbling old pile? We’ve got lots of empty rooms if you don’t mind a few ghostly encumbrances.” “Ah, if you mean the Recoverers,” Finn would say, “Helen has told me about them and I wouldn’t mind them a-tall, a-tall. I’d be honored, Mr. Anstruther.” “Please,” my father would say, “call me Harry.” And then they’d toast it with cocktails that I would mix. Maybe just one for Finn, if he was still on the dry. But you needed a cocktail for a toast.

  And then the whole project had collapsed in a miserable heap because I had forgotten to include Flora. Flora would still be here on my birthday. She had to be somewhere in the picture, and if she were my father couldn’t be asking Finn to live with us yet. Also who could predict how she might derail things or what unwelcome bit of information she might blurt out at any time? My imaginative powers had made a serious miscalculation in timing and logistics, and I was disgusted with myself.

  AT LUNCH, FLORA said, “Listen, Helen, what should we do about supper?”

  “We’re still eating lunch.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Finn is coming to fix the downspout.”

  “So?”

  “Well, I haven’t asked him to supper.”

  “You haven’t?” I had just assumed she had, even though there hadn’t been her usual agonizings over which Juliet-dish to prepare. “Why ever not?” (One of Nonie’s pet phrases.)

  “Well, I didn’t want him to think we’re running after him.”

  “Why on earth would he think that?” I was stalling for time, Nonie-like, until I figured out how to get the upper hand.