The Game of Love and Death

by Martha Brockenbrough

  Death looked from the quilt to the clock and back to the quilt again. She slipped the needle out from the top layer of fabric. Fascinating how such a small, pointed object could bind together so much. She inhaled, feeling comforted by a variety of scents: cotton, baby powder, the beeswax Marion had used to stiffen her thread.

  Death worked the needle and thread through the fabric as well as she could, picking up speed as she grew used to the task. Then, as abruptly as she started, she stood and released time. The clock chimed once, twice, three more times — and Death was gone.

  HENRY retrieved an umbrella from the Cadillac and waved Ethan and James ahead. He’d walk a few paces behind Flora and see to it she got home safely. If he timed his steps to match hers, she wouldn’t even know.

  He liked watching her walk. He liked the look of the umbrella resting on her shoulder, the way her dress swished around her calves with each step, and the smart way her shoes met the sidewalk. No hesitation. Ka-tap, ka-tap, ka-tap. A high-heeled heartbeat softened by the gentle hiss of rain.

  Every so often, she seemed to speed up or slow down. Henry was long used to keeping time with other musicians, so he had no problem responding. But after several blocks she surprised him by stopping short. The scuff-click of his own footstep echoed off of someone’s garage. Flora held still, as though she were listening, and Henry waited for her to turn around. She didn’t.

  As she resumed walking, Henry followed. But after a few strides, she tossed in a little dance step he could not hope to follow. This time, when his footfalls rang out, she stopped.

  “I thought I heard a shadow.” She turned toward him.

  “The noisiest one in the history of shadows. I’m sorry if I alarmed you.”

  “You must have confused me with some other person who is frightened by a stroll.”

  “At midnight? In the rain?”

  Flora peered out from under her umbrella. She pretended to be injured by the raindrops that hit her cheeks. “We could keep going like this,” she said, “or you could walk beside me.” She paused. “Even though I don’t have any gingerbread this time.”

  She remembered that day from when they were children, the day Charles Lindbergh came to town. His pleasure at that left him unable to hold on to his hurt feelings. Not now, not when he was so close to her, thinking about her voice, dying to know what she’d thought of the show. There was no one in his life to talk to about what music meant. He didn’t realize until that moment how much he hungered for such a thing.

  Their umbrellas knocked against each other overhead as they walked, shaking down a net of raindrops, and Flora laughed. “There’s room under mine. Here.”

  She raised her umbrella to make space, and Henry folded his away. She took his other arm. She wasn’t as tall as he’d remembered. The top of her head came to an inch or two below his shoulder. Still, she was the perfect size. His arm would wrap around her waist just so…

  “Cat got your tongue?” She looked up at him.

  “Cat? What?” Henry was glad she couldn’t read his mind. “What did you think of the music tonight?”

  “One of the better bass players I’ve heard,” she said. “But not the best.”

  His heart beat faster and they turned onto Flora’s street. Henry wanted her to say who the best was, and he wanted it to be him, and that need embarrassed him.

  “Ooh, stop!” Flora said. “Listen — midnight.”

  Henry stood next to her, feeling the brim of her hat against his shoulder, her skirt against his calf, the rise and fall of her breathing. The bells of a faraway church pushed through the raindrops. Time slowed so there was nothing but the vibration of the chimes against his skin. The bells stopped, and he resumed breathing.

  Flora tilted her head and looked toward her house. “Strange. The parlor light’s on. It’s awfully late for Nana to be up.”

  When they reached the porch, she ducked out from beneath the umbrella and dashed up the steps. She found the key in her pocketbook and unfastened the lock. She burst inside, leaving the door ajar. Henry wondered whether he should follow. And then Flora cried out.

  Henry followed, ready to fight an intruder. Instead, he found Flora on her knees by the davenport, sobbing. Her grandmother’s mouth gaped and her lips had a bluish tinge, but it was her open eyes that made it clear she was gone.

  Henry froze. It was too late for a doctor. There was nothing the police could do. He felt as if he were the intruder. But he couldn’t leave her alone. Not like this. He sat beside her, silent until she turned toward him a while later.

  “Is there anyone I can call for you?”

  She shook her head. “My uncle — he doesn’t have a telephone.”

  “No friends? No minister?”

  “No one I’d call at this hour,” she said.

  “What about Ethan? I could call him and he could drive here.” He’d have to hope none of the other Thornes picked up. They’d be full of questions he did not care to answer.

  “And what then?”

  Henry was momentarily silent. “We should at least call the coroner.”

  “Not yet,” Flora said. “I want to sit with her awhile.” She smoothed her grandmother’s simple dress. Then she reached up and gently closed the woman’s eyes.

  Eventually she leaned against the davenport. She unpinned her hat and set it on the ground, and Henry realized what people would say if they knew he was with her like this, in her house after midnight, unchaperoned. If he cared about either of their reputations, he would leave. He swallowed hard. Some things were more important than the judgments of others.

  Henry had seen death before. The swift departures of his mother and sister from influenza were first. They’d been fine one day, and then the next, both were feverish. In the days after that, the horrible agony of watching them worsen, their lips cracking, their eyes glazing with incoherence. At the end, his mother had hallucinated about the summer place she had visited as a little girl. It almost looked as if she were having a conversation with someone from beyond.

  He’d learned what a truly sudden death was when his father left the house without his hat for reasons Henry, just a boy of ten, could not understand.

  Father will be back when he realizes he doesn’t have his hat, he thought. I’ll wait for him by the door and he’ll be so glad I found it.

  Henry was sitting on the wooden chair in the foyer with his father’s hat in his lap when the doorbell chimed. He jumped up, holding the hat, wondering why his father hadn’t just walked in. He pulled open the door ready to say, “Father! Look what you forgot!”

  But it wasn’t his father. It was two police officers with serious faces, their own hats held close. The one with the curving mustache asked him to run and fetch his mother.

  “I can’t, sirs,” he said.

  “It’s important,” the other officer said.

  “She’s passed on, sirs,” Henry answered. “So is my sister. It’s just me and my father now. We had to let the servants go after the crash.”

  The police officers took him to the station in their big car. They sat him in front of a scuffed wooden desk. Someone brought a paper sack from the diner down the street, and as he was eating the greasy doughnut inside, the mustachioed police officer informed him that his father had died. Henry didn’t learn how until years later, when he overheard the Thornes whispering about it. Ever since, heights had made him ill.

  Henry remembered himself with a start. Flora was staring at the fireplace.

  “Are you cold?” He felt eager for something useful to do.

  “Cold?” Flora said. “Maybe.”

  He found kindling and matches. Before long, he had a fire roaring. It wasn’t cold enough for such a thing, but the activity helped and the flames were comforting. He turned on more lights in the parlor, keeping the night away as best as he could. Then he sat by Flora again, close e
nough that he could feel her next to him.

  “She made the best gingerbread,” Flora said.

  “I remember,” Henry said.

  She’d moved her hand next to his. “You should have tried her fried chicken. Now —” She couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out without crying again.

  “I wish I had,” Henry said. “I wish —”

  “I wish I hadn’t said no,” Flora said. “I didn’t want to. I was surprised to see you there, with a bass no less, and I felt terrible about what we’d done, and Grady, and I just couldn’t …” She looped her little finger over his, and Henry’s pulse raced.

  “Let’s forget it,” Henry said, as soon as he could speak. “I showed up uninvited. I can see why you thought it was strange. And we’re not, we have no … Let’s just forget it.” He wanted to say something about her not having obligations to him, how he understood why her people wouldn’t want her with someone like him.

  “No,” Flora said. She covered her face with her hands. “I apologize. All of this. I can’t explain it. I don’t mean to be cruel. Something in me went haywire a long time ago. You’re better off staying away.”

  Henry went numb. To want her like this and not be wanted in return: The razor’s edge would hurt less. He stood. “Are you hungry? I could cook you eggs or something.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat again. But help yourself if you want something.” She led him into the tiny kitchen. She sat at the table, keeping a safe distance, folding and unfolding a napkin while Henry set to work.

  He found a cookie sheet, laid strips of bacon on it, and then slid the tray into the oven. As that cooked, he took eggs from the icebox and cracked a half-dozen into a bowl, scrambling them with a splash of cream. He poured the mixture into the pan over a low flame.

  “Just how Nana used to cook them,” Flora said.

  “Is there any other way?” As he nudged the slowly cooking eggs with a wooden spoon, he thought about bringing up the subject of music again. There were a million questions he wanted to ask her, a million things he wanted her opinion on. But he held his tongue. It wasn’t the time. It might be their last chance, but even so, he wanted to comfort her above all else.

  Flora brought up the topic on her own. “Peaches was all right, you know. Your rhythm is better, and you’re bolder on the riffs.”

  He tried not to show how much this pleased him. “Their singer — what was her name? She doesn’t hold a candle to you. Even though —”

  “Ruby? She was having an off night. She’s marvelous.” She twisted the napkins and started refolding them.

  As the eggs finished, he looked for plates. Flora read him like a piece of sheet music. “Second cupboard from the sink.”

  He nodded, found the plates, spooned eggs onto them, and finished everything off with a couple of strips of bacon. It didn’t look elegant, and he didn’t include a sprig of parsley the way Gladys did at the Thornes’, but everything smelled as it was supposed to.

  “Even though what?” She fidgeted with the napkin in her lap.

  He set a plate down in front of her. “Even though you have more in you. I can tell.”

  She eyed him warily. “Maybe.” She looked at the food and sighed. “I probably should try to eat something. It’s going to be a long day ahead and I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep.”

  “Only if you want to,” Henry said. “I needed a task. And I really, really like bacon.”

  The clock struck one. Flora raised a bite of eggs to her mouth. A tear trickled down her cheek. She swallowed and wiped it away. “I’m going to be all alone.”

  “That’s not true.” Henry wished he knew how to comfort her. “You have your uncle.”

  “Not the same,” she said. “My nana raised me.”

  Henry wanted to promise that she’d have him too. But he couldn’t speak those words. She had to want it.

  “I’ll stay with you as long as you need,” he said.

  “Till the coroner comes. That’d be a kindness.” She sighed and pushed away her plate. “I’ll call him now.”

  She walked to the niche where the telephone was kept. Then she dialed the operator, who connected the line. In a brief conversation, she quietly provided all the necessary information. Her voice cracked once, and Henry’s eyes stung at the sound of that small break.

  She returned to the table, scraped her dish, and began washing up. Henry followed.

  “Tell me about your grandmother.” He accepted a wet dish from her hand. As he dried, he thought about life after his mother and sister had passed on. His father wouldn’t allow him to talk about them. Said it wouldn’t change things.

  And then, after his father’s death, no one wanted to mention it because of the shame involved. The silence made him feel as if his family had never existed anywhere outside his memory. It had been so long he was beginning to doubt any of it had ever happened, that he ever had a family and a sister who loved him, that he was ever anybody’s most important thing in the world.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  “Whatever you want to remember.”

  As they tidied the kitchen, Flora told him story after funny story — her nana had once stored extra frosting in a mayonnaise jar, and Flora accidentally made frosted chicken sandwiches with it. Another time, Flora had used salt instead of sugar when she made corn bread. Her nana choked down an entire piece anyway and said it was the most delicious thing she’d ever eaten.

  “And she made quilts,” Flora said. “Whenever anyone had a new baby, whenever she had enough leftover material. She learned how from her grandmother, who made them to send secret communiqués to runaway slaves. They used to hide all sorts of messages in quilts and hang them in windows and over fences.”

  Henry glanced at the quilt on the table in the parlor. “Was there a message in that one?”

  Flora glanced at it. “I’m sure of it. She always put a message in there somewhere, the same one, every time.”

  “What was it?”

  “It’s silly,” Flora said.

  “You don’t have to say.” Henry put the plates back in the cupboard and set to polishing a glass.

  “Oh, it’s nothing I can’t say,” Flora said. “It’s just … well, she used to tell me that she loved me in the quilts. She always sews — sewed — a tiny heart in it somewhere.”

  “I like that. A secret message,” Henry said. He didn’t think it was at all silly. He loved it, actually. Secret messages had been used to win hearts and wars for centuries. A Spartan general named Lysander used to send them in his belt. It was the only part of Henry’s study of the Peloponnesian War that had interested him. “Let’s find it.”

  “She wasn’t finished with this one.”

  “Let’s look,” Henry said. “It couldn’t hurt.”

  Flora held the fabric in her fingertips, examining it closely. “My word.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “No,” Flora said. “She finished it. She’s been working on this one forever, and she finally finished.”

  There was a light knock on the door. Henry stepped into the backyard as she went to greet the coroner. A break in the clouds revealed a splinter of moon along with a scattering of stars. He tried to read them as if they were notes, to see what sort of song the heavens held, but there were so many possibilities he gave up. He inhaled the night, which smelled clean and hopeful. Despite everything, Henry felt calm, as though he’d done what he was meant to do for Flora.

  After the coroner finished, she invited Henry inside again. They sat in the kitchen; the parlor felt too strange. The couch even bore the shape of the old woman’s body, and Henry couldn’t imagine disturbing it. Flora kept apologizing for her tears and Henry wanted to tell her it was all right, that he understood, but he was too unsure of what he was supposed to be doing.

 
“Are you tired?” he asked.

  “Exhausted,” she said. “But I’ll never be able to sleep.”

  “Should I go? I —”

  “Stay,” she said. “Stay until it’s not dark out anymore.”

  She put her hand on his. He wanted nothing more than to lean toward her, touch her face, and press his lips to hers. As he thought this, she blushed and looked down, her eyelashes making that fringe that affected him so. The sky flashed white and thunder boomed, and the rain fell once more, like letters tipped out of a liquid book.

  He did not kiss her. He wanted to. But resisting was the gift he gave her.

  They were too tired to talk, and instead moved their chairs side by side and leaned against each other, quietly sinking into a dreamless sleep.

  When he awoke, the rain had stopped. The first pearly light of day was visible through the window. Flora was up already, percolating coffee. A stack of toast sat on a plate in the middle of the table, but he couldn’t stay. He needed to be home before his absence was discovered — and certainly before any neighbors saw and Flora’s reputation was ruined.

  “Do you have someone to help you with your car?” he asked, remembering her flat tires.

  Flora shrugged and pressed her fingertips against her eyelids. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll have to track down my uncle this morning. And I was scheduled to work at the airstrip this afternoon. That isn’t going to happen.”

  “Please call on me if you need anything.” He allowed himself one light touch on her arm. “I’m so sorry about your grandmother.” He wrote his telephone number on a scrap of paper. Then he gulped scorching coffee, not minding the pain.

  A few minutes later, as he stood in the doorway, Flora touched his arm the way he’d touched hers. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.” He braced himself.