by Gail Godwin
“Because … Oh, I don’t know. You think we should ask him?”
“Oh, no. Just let him come and fix our gutters for free, and then say, ‘Oh, thanks, bye now. Hope you’re not hungry or anything.’ “
“Oh, dear.” The tears were mobilizing.
“So he’ll climb on his motorcycle and ride away thinking, I wonder what I did to make them not like me anymore.”
“I’m going to call him right now.”
“Now, that would look like you’re running after him. Besides, the store’s closed on Sunday. Just wait until he comes this afternoon and say we’re having a light supper, nothing fancy, but he’s welcome to stay.”
“But, he’ll be all sweaty and might feel he should wash.” She seemed to have given this previous thought.
“Well, let him wash here. We certainly have enough bathrooms.”
“In that case, what should we have?”
“You’ll think of something. You always do.”
BUT FINN ALREADY had supper plans. Miss Adelaide, the old lady who was losing her memory and had bruises from head to toe, was back from the hospital and was making him fried chicken and waffles to thank him for taking care of her cat and her garden.
“Oh, chicken and waffles, I can’t compete with that,” said Flora, folding her arms and looking away to hide her mortification.
“Don’t be like that, love. If I had known—”
“No, it’s my fault,” Flora eagerly rushed on. “I didn’t ask earlier because I was afraid you would get sick of seeing us, but then Helen said she wanted you.”
“I did not.”
“Ah,” Finn teased me, “so you didn’t want me.”
“That is not what I meant.” I could have killed Flora for getting me into this trap. Why did she have to proclaim her every self-doubt from the rooftops? Now both of them were anxiously regarding me: the child who might fly off the handle. Well, I would show them. “He is going to get sick of us,” I scolded Flora, “if we won’t let him get on with what he came to do.” Toward Finn I was all business. “Come on,” I said, “I’ll show you where the extension ladder is.”
But once the two of us were in the garage, I relented. He stopped to run a hand lovingly down a rear fender of Nonie’s car. “Nineteen thirty-three Oldsmobile Tudor touring car,” he said like an incantation. “We won’t see its like again.”
“I wish we could drive it,” I said.
“Well, why can’t you?”
“Because Flora never learned to drive and I’m too young to get a license.”
“Are you saying you can drive then?”
“No, but if somebody would teach me I would have a head start.”
“Flora never learned to drive?” he asked just as I was getting ready to add that maybe he would teach me.
“None of her people in Alabama learned. They couldn’t afford a car.”
“That’s no cause a-tall. A lot of folks drive who don’t own automobiles.”
“The school she really wanted rejected her because she couldn’t drive.” Might as well show interest in what interested him, since I had missed out on my chance.
“Ah, was she sorely let down?”
“She cried, but that’s what she always does. She said she wished she had told them she could drive and then had someone teach her before school started.”
“What a shame,” Finn said angrily.
“But she’s real excited about the school that does want her. And some man she met at her interview wrote and said he’d be glad to teach her to drive.”
“I’ll bet he would,” Finn said. “Has anyone been charging the battery?”
“I wasn’t sure how.”
“Turn the key and let the motor run is all it takes.”
“I think the battery is dead,” I said quickly because he was starting to look annoyed with me. “In fact, I’m sure it’s dead.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because a man came and tried, but it wouldn’t start.” I had almost said the man was Mr. Crump, but Finn might check. Let it just be a man.
“That’s a shame,” said Finn.
“My father will see to it when he gets back,” I assured him.
“Well, it’s still a bleeding shame,” said Finn.
I helped him carry the long extension ladder, which he set up at the needy corner of the house with a great deal of shaking and rattling, and then when he had fastened on his tool belt and climbed to the top, Flora and I did our part by lifting up the downspout pipe and holding it steady until he had reattached it to its gutter.
“That should do it, ladies,” he said.
“That’s all?” said Flora, looking woefully up at him. “You mean you’re finished already?”
“With that little task I am. But while we’ve got the ladder up, will I have a look at the other gutters all around the house? I could bail out some of the gunk while I’m about it.”
“Well, I—Helen, what do you think? It’s your house.”
“That would be really nice of you,” I said to Finn on the ladder. “If you’re sure you have the time.”
“Oh, I have. Miss Adelaide doesn’t want me till half past six. What I’ll need, though, is something to put the gunk in.”
“I’ll get a bucket,” cried Flora, already running for the house.
“Are you going to need two people?” I called up to him.
“Come again?”
“Will you need two of us for the bucket part? I’ve got something I need to do in the house.”
“You run on then, darling. Your cousin and I will manage fine.”
“Will you come and say good-bye before you leave?”
“Sure I will. Where will I find you?”
“I’ll be upstairs. It’s easy. You turn left at the top of the stairs and it’s the first room. I’ll be working in there. Will you come when you’ve finished the gutters?”
“I will. But it might be an hour or so. Is that all right?”
“Perfect. I have something I want to show you.”
AT LAST, AT last, I thought, triumphantly racing up the stairs—stairs Finn would be climbing for the first time in “an hour or so”—I am learning how to get people to do as I want. Flora didn’t count. She was too easy, too much like someone my own age. No, not even that. She was easier than wily Annie Rickets; easier than Rachel Huff, whose sullen moods somehow insulated her like a black cloud from the demands of others; easier, even, than tranquil Brian Beale, so congenial to play with but stubbornly set in his ways when it came to what he wanted us to play.
It was almost ready, the Devlin Patrick Finn room: the room that had not been named for Starling Peake because he had let us down, the room my mother had chosen to lie and read in when she was expecting me. The drawers of the old cheval dresser had been emptied and lined with paper (the perfectly good extension cord, the sealed pack of cards, and the two buckeyes placed neatly in the top drawer for Finn); I had cleaned its tilting glass with vinegar and newspaper, the way I had seen Mrs. Jones do it, and I had shined the mirror above the sink, where Finn’s pointy face would look back at him when he shaved. (“We’ll need to get a desk or a table in here,” I heard myself telling him, “but we waited to see which you preferred for your artwork.” “One thing this old pile has plenty of,” my father might add, if he was accompanying us, “is furniture. You’ll trip over it and bust your head if you’re not careful.”)
If only I hadn’t told Finn, “I’ve got something I need to do in the house.” He probably thought I had to go to the bathroom. I should have said, “I’ve got some work I need to do in the house.” But aside from that I felt I had developed my social arts this summer, even in all our isolation, and had to concede that Flora had contributed to my progress. Flora, however easy, had provided me with a round-the-clock living human specimen to practice on.
There was one thing left to be done before Finn came upstairs, and it turned out to be harder than I had expected. I wanted the bed t
o be back at the window, the way it was in my mother’s time, but in my impatience and frustration in moving it I made an ugly gash in the floor. I dragged my father’s oriental rug over it, but that left a big square of bare floor that was lighter than the rest because it had been under the rug for so long. There was nothing to do but drag in the other oriental rug from the other Recoverer’s room to cover the naked square. The result was a success, but it had worn me out. I lay down on my mother’s old bed by the window, thinking of the poor lady in the poem who had to watch life through a mirror, and felt myself sinking alarmingly toward a childish nap. But that would be all right, too. Finn would come up and wake me, like that day when I crouched like a catatonic by the side of the road. “Hello, hello,” he would say, bending over the bed. “Is anyone there?”
XXIII.
Once, when I was five, I took an afternoon nap and woke up and found things had been done without me. Before the nap, Nonie and I had been sitting on the sofa coloring together. I always did the characters in the picture and allowed her to color in the background, which she did in such a way that enhanced my artwork. It was a superior coloring book, or at least I’m remembering it that way. The paper was smooth, not porous, the pages lay flat, and the pictures were from myths, fairy tales, and the Bible. The picture was on the right side and its story was on the left side. We always read the story first so we could get an idea of how the picture ought to be colored in. I don’t remember the picture we had finished before Nonie said, “Someone looks sleepy,” and walked me to my room, but I remember some of the pictures in the book. There was Cinderella and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Noah receiving the dove telling him the coast was clear, and Ruth and Naomi, and Joseph in his coat of many colors (but not what his brothers were going to do to him on the trip) and Aladdin and Pandora, and Psyche holding a candle over Cupid while he slept. The coloring book was called A Color Book of Old Stories. I still look for it sometimes online, but have never found anything remotely like it. For a while I had this fantasy that I would suddenly hit on it, A Color Book of Old Stories, and order it, and when it arrived I would get some crayons and turn to the page in question and redeem my lost colors.
When I woke up from my nap and went looking for Nonie, I found her sitting on the sofa with the closed coloring book on her lap. She looked guilty when she saw me.
“What did you do while I was asleep?” I demanded.
“Well, I colored another picture,” she said, an odd blush rising in her cheeks. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Which one? Let me see.”
She turned to the one of Pandora opening the chest full of bad things, the entire picture colored in with her choice of colors. “Is that all right?” she asked rather sheepishly.
“That’s the one I was saving—to do BY MYSELF!”
“Then I have overstepped.”
I looked with disgust at the pink-cheeked figure in her blue gown. Pandora’s dress was supposed to be blackish purple, her face chalk white with dark shadows from what she realizes she has set loose on the world. And the sinister faces and writhing bodies of the plagues and sorrows floating out of the open chest that I had been planning to do one by one in devilish, jarring colors, Nonie had crayoned over so they all looked submerged in a watery green effluvium.
“I’m sorry, darling,” Nonie said. “But you’ve still got Aladdin, which has a similar story.”
“I wanted Pandora,” I said.
WHEN I WOKE up from my nap in Finn’s future room, I immediately had the feeling that something had not happened, but I did not begin to imagine all that had happened without me.
The light in the sky was too late for it to have been just an hour. I had drooled on the bedspread. It was very quiet outside. He didn’t come was my dismal thought. Then I heard a man’s voice in the living room below. Then a clink of a teacup in a saucer and Flora’s eager-to-be-impressed response, then the man again. His voice was deep and harsh, at the other end of the scale from Finn’s spun-glass tenor, and he spoke in blunt clumps, like someone who liked making his points more than he liked making friends.
I got up and checked my woozy self in the cheval glass, but that part of the room was in shadow, so I went across the hall to the mirror in the big bathroom. I looked for signs that Finn might have washed up in here, but the fresh hand towels were folded just as Mrs. Jones had hung them.
As I crept down the stairs it occurred to me that the man was probably Mr. Crump, returned for more of Flora’s corn bread—and probably with another unwelcome offer to buy Nonie’s car. But it was a much older man than Mr. Crump on the sofa beside Flora, having tea from a pot and pound cake.
“There you are!” cried Flora.
“Where is Finn?”
“Oh, honey, he had to go. He had his dinner engagement with Miss Adelaide.”
“He promised to come upstairs before he left.”
“He did, but you were sound asleep in your new office. He said he couldn’t bear to wake you.”
“It’s a study, not an office.” (It’s not going to be a study, either, but you won’t know that.)
“Sorry, honey, study.”
Holding his teacup and saucer aloft in front of his chest, the old man impertinently danced his beetle-black eyes on my distress.
“Helen, do you know who this is?” Flora asked.
“I’m … not sure.” He was an old man in a Sunday shirt and a stand-up tuft of wispy white hair and those rude little beetle-black eyes. I might have met him before, but I couldn’t think where.
“This is your grandmother’s half brother, Mr. Earl Quarles,” she announced as though she were presenting royalty.
It was the Old Mongrel himself, sitting on our sofa inside our house.
“Stepbrother, not half brother,” I corrected.
“The young lady’s right,” the Old Mongrel spoke up. “Honora and I were no relation. But I thought the world of her.”
I lingered resentfully against the archway separating the living room from the hallway. How had this happened? My father would be beside himself with disgust. If people did such a thing as turn over in their graves, Nonie would be doing that right now.
“How about a slice of pound cake, Helen?”
“I’m really not hungry.”
“Well, come in and keep Mr. Quarles company while I get more hot water.”
“Not for me,” said the Old Mongrel. “I reckon I ought to be getting along home.” But Flora was off to the kitchen with the teapot and he made no move to leave.
I walked sedately across to Nonie’s wing chair and sat facing him.
“I haven’t had a cup of pot-brewed tea since my wife died,” he said, with the return of the singsongy whine I recalled from the funeral home. “Now they just serve you up a bag with lukewarm water on the side and call that tea.”
Unwilling to make small talk about tea bags, I sat erect on the edge of the chair and stared at him.
He put down his cup and saucer. “You favor her,” he said.
“Who?” I was not going to help him.
“Honora. Your grandmother. You must miss her a heap.”
I certainly wasn’t going to respond to that, even if he started to think I was a cretin.
“She wasn’t much older than you when we met. Oh, me, it was a bad day for her.” He uttered a wheezy, almost soundless laugh. “Hated me on sight. Well, I don’t blame her. But after a while we made friends. She ever talk about me?”
I could barely shake my head. My lips felt pasted against my teeth.
“I was nine years older. So there was a period there when she was still a child and I was already a man, but then that changed and we were more like equals. But she was always smarter than me. I knew that right from the start. Smart and high-tempered.” Another wheezy chuckle. “Oh, me.”
Oh, God, Flora, where are you?
“What grade are you in school?” Even a slow-witted child could answer that.
“I’ll be goin
g into sixth.”
“Your daddy’s the principal, isn’t he?”
“He’s principal of the high school.”
“That’s what I thought. I was looking at some acreage that’s about to go on sale at the top of your hill this afternoon and thought I’d drop by and pay my respects to him. But your cousin says he’s over in Oak Ridge doing some important war work. How old is your father now?”
Never ask a person’s age, I had been taught practically from infancy. “My father is the age of the century,” I said, which would show that I knew his age without actually saying it.
“Oh no, he couldn’t be.”
This was too much. “I guess I ought to know my own father’s age,” I said as coldly as I could.
“With all due respect, young lady, you must have got your figures wrong.”
“My grandfather wrote a poem on the day my father was born. ‘Midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this December morn / a boy is born.’ It’s in a book upstairs in my grandfather’s consulting room. The date at the bottom of the poem says December the eighth, nineteen hundred. That’s my father’s birthday.”
This silenced the Old Mongrel. He looked gratifyingly flummoxed. And my small victory was that I still hadn’t said my father’s age.
Flora came back with the pot just as he was heaving himself up from the sofa. “Oh no, Mr. Quarles, you’re not leaving?”
“I better be getting on home, Miss Flora. My cataracts don’t operate so well when the dusk sets in.”
“I hope you and Helen got a little acquainted.”
“Oh, I would say we did.” Standing up, he was taller than I expected. “She takes after Honora all right.” Again the almost soundless, wheezy chuckle. “Well, you all have been very kind to me and I thank you for your hospitality. At least I got to meet the young lady and your nice friend, and I’m glad I could help with the Oldsmobile.”
Looking down at me he explained, “We jumped Honora’s batteries with my cables and gave Miss Flora her first driving lesson while you was having your nap. She needs to mash on the brake less, but she’s going to do real well. She’ll tell you all about it.”
