Flora

by Gail Godwin

  We all three carried in the groceries and Flora put everything where it went.

  “I got your baking powder and the vanilla,” Finn told her, “but there wasn’t a block of baking chocolate to be found—”

  “Never mind, we’ll think of something tomorrow,” said Flora, hurrying him past that subject. “Helen, why don’t you show Finn our beautiful pantry?”

  Flora had her driving lesson. Finn was teaching her to back the Oldsmobile out of the garage, but she kept sideswiping the garbage can until he said, “That’s enough for today, love, we’ll try again tomorrow,” and backed out for her. Then they proceeded with their usual lesson, stopping and starting and reversing and changing gears, round and round the circular drive Finn and I had restored together.

  Then Flora put her casserole in the oven and excused herself for a quick bath because she said she was all sweaty. Finn and I were left by ourselves, which was nice, except I was nervous. Not expecting Flora’s bath, I hadn’t prepared anything to say.

  “You must be so proud of your father,” said Finn, following me into the living room. “I hope I can meet him someday.”

  “You will. He’s coming home in two weeks and four days. Maybe sooner. But I don’t want to think about it till tomorrow.”

  “Which is your birthday.” Finn sat down next to me on the sofa and placed a parcel tied with string on the coffee table. “The wartime wrapping you’ll have to excuse. But I hope you like what’s inside.”

  It was a handsome wooden box of colored pencils, accompanied by an artist’s drawing pad. “They’re the kind I use, when I can get them,” said Finn, running his fingers lovingly across the pencils in their separate velvet trenches. “Made in Holland. After supper, we’ll try them out.”

  I was taken aback when the freshly bathed Flora reappeared in the blue dress I hadn’t seen her wear since Nonie’s funeral. Its cut and drapery suited her better than any of her other clothes, and she had put on her high heels and some makeup. I felt not only upstaged but put at a disadvantage. I was in my same clothes from the morning and hadn’t been given a chance to wash off our day’s activities.

  We ate after the six o’clock news with Lowell Thomas. The big-name evening newscasters themselves had been upstaged because by now everyone had heard the shocking highlights earlier in the day. Blast equal to thousand tons of TNT. Most destructive force ever devised by man. Sixty thousand dead and still counting. The entire Japanese Second Army wiped out on their parade ground while doing morning calisthenics.

  “I know it’s unpatriotic,” said Flora, “but I can’t stop feeling horrible about all those dead and burned people.”

  “It’s not unpatriotic,” Finn corrected her, “it’s human.”

  “How will this affect your chances with that Army board?”

  “I’ve been wondering myself. It scotches my chances of getting shipped off to fight the Japs and redeeming my war record. But maybe they’ll find a place for me in demobilization. I can sit behind a desk for a year or two and help send others home.”

  “What is scotches?” I asked.

  “You scotch a wheel with a wedge,” explained Finn, “to keep it from rolling.”

  “Oh,” I said, understanding.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” said Flora, blushing through her makeup. “But I’m glad your getting shipped off to fight the Japs is scotched.”

  “Well, and I’m not sorry that you’re glad,” Finn softly responded.

  AFTER SUPPER WE returned to the living room to try out my pencils. There was still plenty of light coming through the west windows. Finn sat next to me and demonstrated how to alter the shade of a color by applying various degrees of pressure. Then he showed how you could blend a red with a yellow to make orange, a blue with a red to make purple, a blue and a yellow to make green, and a red, yellow, and blue to make brown. For these exercises, he used a page from his own sketchbook, which he always carried with him, so I wouldn’t have to mess up my new one.

  Flora kept up a steady murmur of accolades as she paced back and forth behind us or perched on the sofa arm on Finn’s side. “This is just so impressive … I can use this with my class at school. Will it work the same with Crayolas?”

  “Not exactly,” said Finn. “These are very soft leads. Crayons are mostly wax. But your kids will get the idea.”

  Then he said it was time we tried an actual portrait, if Flora would be so good as to sit in the chair and serve as our model.

  “Oh no, please,” she protested.

  “How will I teach her to draw a portrait, then? Do you see someone else I could ask? Of course, Helen and I could imagine some person besides yourself sitting in the chair, but what if we don’t imagine the same person?”

  I thought this was hilarious and it shut Flora up. She took her position obediently in the wing chair and let Finn tell her how he wanted her to arrange herself.

  “The first thing I want you to do,” Finn instructed me, “is to fix your eyes on Flora. Then I want you to squint until she gets all blurry and you can see only the shape she makes in the chair.”

  “Just her head?”

  “No, the whole body. The shape it makes against the chair, but not the chair. Get that shape firmly in your head. The angle of it, where it bears its weight. Now, we’ll take a pencil, this yellow will do, and laying the point sideways on the paper we lightly rub in the shape.” He demonstrated on his own pad, making Flora in her blue dress no more than a yellow bag leaning sideways. “Now you have a go.” He handed over the pencil.

  I sat paralyzed over my new drawing pad. “What if I make a mistake and ruin my first page?”

  “Will we switch, then?” He handed over his pad with the yellow blob. “But will you care to have my drawing on your first page?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.” People would think it was my drawing.

  “Well, in that case—” He took back the yellow pencil and duplicated the blob in my pad. “There. Now we each have our shape to work with. And inside this shape is a person. Unlike any other person in the world.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Flora with a nervous titter.

  Finn gave Flora one of his sweet, accepting looks. He probably looked at Miss Adelaide that way when she remembered one more thing she’d forgotten. “Now,” he said, handing me a blue pencil and taking a darker blue for himself, “we’ll start at the top with the hair on the head, but here, again, we’re after a shape, not a hairstyle. How the cloud of dark sits on the face below … I know, I know, we haven’t done the face yet, but the whole thing’s a package, don’t you see, you’ve got to keep this whole package of a person in your mind, seeing how one thing flows out of another, an arm out of a shoulder, the curve of the body that allows the hand to rest so naturally on the thigh of the crossed leg. The mistake most beginners make is they draw each thing separate and then nothing connects. But we’ve put down our yellow shape to guide us, so we won’t make that mistake.”

  “This isn’t working,” I said, after a minute. “Yours already looks like her hair but mine doesn’t.”

  “Yours looks fine. Leave it for now and find the curve of the neck in your shape and sketch it in. Great, that’s great. Now we come round the shoulder and round out the arm, and then, er, there’s this fullness” (he was doing Flora’s breast—or bust she would call it) “and notice the shadows it makes against the inside of the arm …”

  We continued on like this until a likeness of Flora, the real essence of her presence in the chair, emerged under Finn’s hand.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I make the same marks you do, but mine look different.”

  “It’s looking at the model you’re meant to be doing, not at my ‘marks,’” Finn scolded with an affectionate nudge of his arm against mine. “Yours is coming along, wait and see. You must have faith in yourself.”

  “That’s exactly what Mrs. Anstruther would have said!” exclaimed Flora from Nonie’s chair.

  “Shush,” I said
. “You’re the model.”

  My body shape, or rather Flora’s as I had drawn it, wasn’t hopeless. Finn’s instructions had protected it from beginner’s anatomical naïveté. But when he finally let us fill in the face, I got something wrong and spoiled the whole picture. What made it worse was that I couldn’t locate what I had done wrong. I was furious with myself. I had suppressed a childish giggle while we had been working on Flora’s “bust,” but what if I failed to suppress my childish tears of frustration?

  “Honey, I think you’re getting tired,” said Flora.

  “You shut up.”

  “Ah, now,” Finn sorrowfully chided. “What is it that’s made you cross?”

  “I ruined the face.” Now a tear escaped. To keep from doing a complete Flora, I silently strung together the filthiest words I knew.

  Finn lifted up a layer of the pencil box and extracted something. “Do you see this? It’s called an eraser.”

  “Erasers smudge.”

  “Not this eraser. It’s made to go with these pencils. There’s also a wee sharpener under here, for when you’ll be needing it for the pencils. Now, how did you ruin the face?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, start at the top. Is it the forehead? The eyes?”

  “The eyes, I think.”

  “What about them? Don’t be looking at my marks, look at the model.”

  “Hers are further apart.”

  “Right! Those far-apart eyes are one of her most beguiling features. So, let’s fix them.”

  Flora had turned on the lamps before it was time for the 7:45 news we sometimes listened to. I was not sorry to see the summer light fading earlier. It meant school would be starting and my father would be home and Flora would be back in Alabama. H. V. Kaltenborn, or Hans von Kaltenborn, as Nonie liked to call him, had no new horror stories from Japan to offer, but he pointed out in his ominous, rat-a-tat diction that, for all we knew, we had created a Frankenstein’s monster, and with the passage of a little time an enemy might improve it and use it against us.

  “If it’s all right with everybody, I’m going to switch to some music,” said Flora.

  “That is a lovely dress,” Finn said as she swished past him to the console radio in her high heels. “Doing your portrait, I was thinking there ought to be a special name for its color. Darker than cobalt and purpler than Prussian: ‘twilight blue,’ perhaps.”

  If it had been just the two of us she would be barefooted by now. And of course would not be in the “twilight blue” dress.

  “Juliet Parker made it for me,” Flora said, finding a dance music station. “She bought the material for herself, but then when Mrs. Anstruther died she wanted me to have something nice for the funeral.”

  “I’d like to meet your Juliet Parker,” Finn said.

  “Well, who knows? Maybe you will,” said Flora gaily, tapping him on the head as she passed behind the sofa. “I’m going to make us some coffee.”

  “Major Glenn Miller,” said Finn, nodding at the radio. “Another irreplaceable mortal whose plane went down.” He shook his head sadly, then sprang to his feet and held out his arms. “Let’s dance, Helen.”

  “I don’t dance very well yet.”

  “Well, here’s a chance to shorten that ‘yet.’”

  “Really, I can’t—”

  “Ah, I know what you’re capable of when you say really you can’t. I’ve seen it, remember? I’ve seen you jump into the unknown.”

  “Shush,” I said, frowning toward the kitchen as I let him pull me up, like that day he pulled me out of my stupor from the side of the road.

  “I know, I know. It’s our secret.”

  Annie Rickets and I had devised our own frantic version of jitterbugging, and last summer Mrs. Beale had found some hard-up old couple who had once run an Arthur Murray studio to teach Brian and me (poor Brian) the basic ballroom steps. But with Finn’s palm warm and solid at your back and him guiding you with your joined hands, your movements were in his custody. It was a world apart from two separate bodies striving to “dance.”

  “You see?” he crooned as we spun around the threadbare carpet.

  “If I was taller I could reach you better.”

  “Don’t be in such a rush, darling. I didn’t get my full height till I was seventeen.”

  “Don’t stop on account of me,” cried Flora, returning with the tray. “You two look great.” In typical Flora flutter she set everything out on the coffee table. On a plate covered with one of my prewar birthday napkins (sailboats, age six) she had interlaced Fig Newtons with the leftover pound cake, which wouldn’t have been enough by itself. Then with a stagy sigh of contentment, she tucked herself neatly into a corner of the sofa, and made a big show of studying the two portraits of herself in the drawing pads. “Never in my life have I been made such a fuss over. And, you know, I love them both. Each of them shows me a new side of myself.”

  As in his earlier drawing, Finn had made her prettier than she was; but what new side of herself had mine revealed to her?

  Then Finn commented, as he had once before, that you got to know a person by drawing them. “And sometimes while drawing someone”—he addressed Flora, speaking above the music—“you discover things about yourself in relation to that person.”

  “Like what?” Flora was all eagerness.

  “Like feelings.” He spoke over my head as he maneuvered me about on the carpet. “Feelings you didn’t know you had about that person.”

  Each new time Finn spun me around while continuing to talk to Flora above the music, a certain object began to annoy me. I became vexed, then indignant, then enraged, by the eight-ounce glass of milk set down so emphatically among the cozy coffee things.

  The music stopped for a commercial break. “You are going to be a fine dancer,” Finn said, releasing me. “Helen doesn’t know her own powers,” he remarked to Flora.

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” said Flora, now busily pouring coffee into the two cups. “I was saying to her only the other day ‘I feel I should pay your father tuition for all the things I’ve learned from you this summer.’”

  “It wasn’t the other day, it was this morning,” I corrected. “And you didn’t say you learned them from me, you just said learned.” It suddenly occurred to me that both of them were patronizing me, making me feel important so they could say things to each other over my head.

  “You’re right, honey, it was this morning,” Flora instantly capitulated. “My, what a full day it’s been. So many things happening in one day.” She tucked her twilight blue skirt closer to her body, indicating Finn should sit next to her. “Come have your coffee while it’s hot.”

  “Did anyone hear me say I wanted milk?” I asked, still standing in the middle of the carpet where Finn had left me.

  “Well, no, but you always have a glass at”—she swerved wildly, just avoiding the bedtime word—“the end of the day.”

  “Yes, but tonight I want to celebrate my father.” I walked over to the sideboard, and opened the center cabinet, which smelled musty from staying closed all summer. Out came the cognac bottle and the fluted crystal aperitif glass Nonie always used for her nightcaps. I sloshed the glass full, raised it to the orange sky outside the western window, and before Flora could react I drank it down.

  “Oh, honey, no—” she said with an intake of a breath, like someone begging a person not to jump off a high building. Except that I had already jumped.

  I poured a second glass and raised it to the pair on the sofa. “I’d like to drink to my father for helping make the bomb,” I said.

  Finn was the first to collect himself. “Hear, hear,” he said, raising his coffee cup before he’d even put in the cream. “To Helen’s father.”

  “To Helen’s father,” Flora barely whispered, raising her cup.

  We all three drank. I would have liked to drain the second glass, but my nose and chest were still on fire from the first. I managed a respectable gulp, and then said
, in a somewhat shaky voice, “I think I’ll sip the rest of my nightcap in my room.”

  “Don’t you think that’s enough, honey?” Flora half-rose to take the glass away from me, but I cut her short.

  “Good night, Finn. Thank you very much for the pencils and the art lesson. No, please, don’t get up. Good night, Flora. Thank you for dinner and all the things you did for me today.”

  “Would you like for us to come and tell you good night after a while?” Flora asked, sounding defeated.

  “No, thank you. I’m really very tired.”

  HERE I WAS again on the upholstered bench that fitted into the alcove of Nonie’s dressing table. Hardly past infancy, I had begun clambering up this bench and flailing my little legs until I achieved a sitting position in front of the three-way mirror. In the long mirror was myself as a whole child, from curly top to socks and shoes. The mirrors on either side were shorter because they only started above the drawers where Nonie kept her grooming items. They gave you what was called your profile. You could never see your own profile except in mirrors like these. People had preferences about their profiles. A movie star would tell the cameraman, “Shoot my left profile, it’s better.” And if you adjusted the side mirrors, pulled them closer around you like a wrap, you could see more reflections from more angles, even the way you looked from the back. But who would want to see any more Helens? Certainly not the pair I had left behind in the living room. Not Brian, not the Huffs (despite the birthday card), certainly not Annie Rickets (“You’ve got a few more months of people feeling sorry for you. But after that, you’d better take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror.”). Not Father McFall, not my father, and sometimes not Nonie (“I’m going to pick up Helen from school and take her to the movies so my son can have a quiet house.”). Even for Mrs. Jones, one of me was probably sufficient.

  Okay, Annie, I’m here, taking that good, long look you recommended. I’m not going to ask you what you would see if you were standing behind me—the way I was not standing behind Nonie that day she was trying on the Easter hat. In fact, I’m not going to think your thoughts, at all. I can imagine only too well the kinds of things you would say about what just happened in our living room. No, shut up, I said I wasn’t going to think about it. This is just between me and me. Helen in the looking glass assessing Helen on the bench.