For my mother, Susan Rieger, and my father, Peter Pouncey—my first and favorite storytellers, my great good luck
He’s my poet of poets—I know him almost by heart.
—Henry James, The Aspern Papers
‘You look as if you wished the place in Hell,’ My friend said, ‘judging from your face.’ ‘Oh well, I suppose it’s not the place’s fault,’ I said.
—Philip Larkin, “I Remember, I Remember”
a cognizant original v5 release october 06 2010
Contents
FALL
1
Borrowed Houses
2
Paris, Athens, Rome, Darwin
3
Literary Executioners
4
Nighttimes
5
Rearrangements
6
Revolts
7
Other People Are a Wall
8
The Good Parents
9
The Living
10
Poems
WINTER
11
A Man Who Noticed Things
12
Institutional Life
13
Women Without Men
14
Lifelong Learner
15
New Routines
16
Visitations
17
The Underworld
18
The Science Correspondent
SPRING
19
The End of School
20
Number One Criminal
21
Darwin Burning
22
The Responsible Anarchist
23
Commencement
Fall
1
Borrowed Houses
IT WAS AFTER HER FATHER’S DEATH Flora returned to Darwin. Returning—with all the criminal associations—to the scene of her growing up had been a task she’d put off, rebuffing her father’s invitations. “You don’t go home much, do you?” friends would ask. Home—that fuzzy image of innocence, that haven of recognition. The place you long for when adrift.
Her father’s voice in her mind’s ear paused her: So all I had to do, Flo, to get you to Darwin was die? But it did not stop her. She caught a taxi to the bus station, and took the bus to its terminus, a desolate former mill town thirty minutes from Darwin, and then she loaded herself and her body bag of a suitcase into a country cab—more properly called a car, a crumby minivan, with nothing marking it as professional in any way—now bringing her to her father’s house.
She did not sublet her apartment in the city; there wasn’t time, and the thought of someone else sleeping in her bed and filling her closets made her anxious—an only child, she’d never liked to share. She knew what people did in other people’s houses, and did not want it done to her. And who knew how long she’d be gone. But she had taken the time to pack all the things she liked best, leaving the B garments behind. She packed her three favorite pairs of jeans of varying degrees of tightness and wear, a pair of black corduroys, two A-line skirts, one high-slitted denim pencil skirt, and a black silk dress she’d bought several years back upon receiving her first reasonable paycheck, imagining a life of cocktail parties and cigarette holders, and worn once. She packed socks and tights, three delicate wool cardigans, one milky white cable-knit cashmere turtleneck, five long-sleeved cotton shirts of assorted saturated colors, clogs, her turquoise old-lady slippers, sweatpants and two concert T-shirts she’d had since high school, boots (one pair heeled, one flat), her six sexy pairs of underwear and her four unsexy, old, comforting pairs of underwear, and various scarves and hats. She packed a short, beaded 1920s-style flapper dress—a prime example of her favorite category of clothing: inappropriate for every occasion (and thus equally appropriate for all occasions)—and a pair of pewter-colored four-inch heels of the same category. She packed soap, shampoo, and other ablutions (as if she were traveling to the tundra, where such items could not be procured, and not to New England, where they could, but then they might be inferior), and, in the midst of the vanities, she buried the folder of her father’s poems. If I lose this bag, she thought, forcing the zipper across its length, I’ll be very sad.
Darwin was three hours from everywhere: Flora was unready to arrive. It was dusk, and quiet, her country cab passing the odd station wagon loping home. Darwin—the one place in America SUVs had not yet colonized. Perhaps they were against the law. Here the indigenous station wagon still reigned supreme over his niche. Here talk of carbon footprint was as routine as talk of gas prices elsewhere. The town of Darwin knew unhappiness—the Darwinians self-satisfied but not content. Thick with academics and their broods—idlers, ruminators, moseyers. Thoughtful people, thinking thoughts. No one hurrying down the few placid streets. Hadn’t the Darwinians anything urgent to attend to? Yes, they had not. Poets and the world romanticize being idle—the boon of free time praised, guarded, envied—but anyone who has idled for a living knows the damaging effects it can have on the moods.
The minivan was overheated, stifling. The window wouldn’t budge. Flora’s hair itched with sweat. She was being cooked alive. She took off her hat, uncoiled her scarf, unbuttoned her coat. She was a child. Her clothes, hidden all day beneath layers—why did one prefer to keep one’s coat on in public transit?—announced a complete regression. The faded black sweatshirt, the army green pants with the patched knees and safety-pinned waist, the red sneakers that she dearly loved. “Not a day over sixteen,” her father had said of her face. At what age did the compliment of youth expire?
The driver tried talk: “What brings you to Darwin?” He had the overeager voice of one stranger requiring something of another.
“You know,” Flora said. “Family.” But once she’d said the words, they sounded unkind. The man’s face ravaged, ungroomed. It was possible he did not know much of family. A woman in his life would have suggested a haircut weeks ago.
Still, the unkindness hanging in the close air was preferable to chat. She glanced at her cell phone to check the time. It was now “rejecting” text messages—an apt technological gesture—its tiny brain at capacity, and Flora thought with pleasure of her friends agonizing over compassionate abbreviated condolences, only to have them bounce right back to their machines as though repellent.
Her father’s house sat at the edge of the town proper, a ten-minute walk from the Darwin College campus. An old farmhouse, it had recently been repainted an excellent taupe. When, exactly? Even through the fouled window of the car, it had never looked prettier, or she hadn’t remembered it that way. A pretty house, certainly, but she’d thought of it as resigned and downtrodden in that way peculiar to academics and their surroundings. But her father, it seemed, had even taken up gardening, or else hired someone to work on the historically neglected flower beds circling the house like a moat, the odd stem standing its ground as though it didn’t know it was November. The house was a relic from a happier time. The house was showing off. The house was oblivious; it hadn’t been informed of recent developments.
She overtipped the driver as an apology for her curtness and he hauled her morbid duffel to the door—newly painted, slate blue. Flora hesitated, as at the door of an acquaintance, where she might not be welcome, or know anyone inside. The house of a sixty-eight-year-old retiree bachelor, a reclusive reader, an academic with no more classes or committees to order his life around. Would it be pathologically unkempt, like the foul apartments of boys she’d dated post-college, the disordered universe of men living alone? Would it feel as though he’d dashed out for a haircut, or for dish soap, and could return at any moment? Or would the house have the aura
of the abandoned, like a woman whose husband runs out to gas up the car and forgets to come home?
The house was hers, on paper.
Funny how death did that—made things yours.
It was a few years after Flora and her mother moved out, after they who had needed only one house suddenly needed two, after all that had gone wrong, that her father had finally left the President’s House and come here to this house he owned, giving up one of his worlds, the world of industrial stoves, and Betsy coming to work every day, a world where you had to dial 9 to get an outside line, as though it were an office, which of course it also was, a world of life-size paintings of dead men and grand chandeliers and fire escapes, to return to the life of the full-time academic—the word full-time in this case meaning you had to show up four times a week for approximately two hours a pop. He’d loved it right away, his old farmhouse. “I like a house that tells you how it feels,” he said of its creaks and moans. In winter there was a fire always burning, in summer the windows thrown open. “I’m embowered,” he said in spring, the yellow green of leaves and buds filling every view. In high school, Flora had stayed there with him Tuesday nights, that old habit outlasting its necessity, her mother completely analyzed, for better or worse, and no longer fleeing Darwin weekly for the city. Her father’s house. A place she visited—if she visited—with a packed bag.
Inside, all appeared tidy. She dropped her bag in the kitchen, waiting.
“Hello?” she called, to disturb the silence. There you are, her father would say if he were there. “Here I am.”
She started with his study, surveying—no need to linger now. Off the kitchen, browns and grays, a blend of woods, snug. Books on shelves like rows of crooked teeth. On the desk, tall piles of papers. But no reading glasses lying, arms crossed in wait, on the table by the Shaker chair. No forgotten encrusted cereal bowl. She skimmed her fingers across the old Smith Corona portable with its round green keys. Nothing. Entering the homes of other people was something Flora did for a living—or had done. She was adept at moving through other people’s spaces, taking inventory. A professional snoop.
Back through the kitchen. No cottony coating of dust on the banister. Upstairs, the bed made, the duvet new and crisp and hotel-like. Not a single sock on the wide-planked floor. No bath mat on the terracotta tiles of the bathroom floor, but folded and hung neatly on the side of the tub like a coat hung over an arm. No unearthly blue toothpaste smudges on the sink, only gleaming porcelain. Had her father even lived there? Had anyone? In her job, she’d had to orchestrate the removal of the personal for photo shoots: She’d scoured living rooms for family snapshots, reclaimed refrigerators from the collage of a child’s artwork. Here, her work had been done for her.
The fridge, she thought. Back downstairs. She opened it and stared into cavernous whiteness—still more nothing. Had he stopped eating? He had looked a little thinner, maybe, when she saw him last. The neatness was disappointing—to have nothing to scrub, to fix, to set right. Then she saw the note, fixed to the refrigerator door with a magnetic college mascot, the Darwin Dodo: “Dear Flora, Stopped by and straightened up a bit. I have Larks. I’m so sorry. Mrs. J.”
Larks, her father’s dog, short for Larkin, named for the poet. Flora had completely forgotten him. Were it not for Mrs. J., the dog, too, would be dead. Of course Mrs. J. would have thought to clean out the fridge and straighten up the house and feed and care for the dog, and the cloying neatness surrounding Flora was not a sign of her father’s life, just more proof of his death. Evidence kept piling up. For a moment, she resented Mrs. J.’’ thoughtfulness, her thoroughness. What if in her cleaning she had erased some sign her father left behind, some communiqué from the beyond he’d intended just for her?
Her father hadn’t died in the house—a small relief. He’d gone to his old office to say hello and pick up some mail. While there, he’d cut short a conversation with Pat Jenkins, the English Department secretary, and gone into the bathroom abruptly. It was so uncharacteristic of him, cutting short a good chat like that, and when he didn’t reemerge after fifteen minutes, Pat sent Jed Schwartz, an associate professor, in after him. Jed found him lying on the floor, bleeding from a gash on his forehead. It looked as though he’d passed out and hit his head on the sink. A horrible place to die, a bathroom—an embarrassing venue for such an important moment. He wouldn’t have liked that, wouldn’t have written it that way. When Flora heard the details, she had tried to clarify, tried to undo: “You’re absolutely certain it was in the bathroom?” She’d gotten stuck on it for days, until her mother said, “Jesus, Flora, of all things to worry about.” But where mattered, just like when mattered, and how mattered.
The how he would have liked better. No humiliating, protracted illness. No slow, relentless degeneration. A colossal bang, a candle snuff. Sudden death—an expression from the world of sports. One day life being life and the next day it being something else. Flora would not have admitted it to herself before, but she’d long expected that if her father died, he would die in a car crash. He had loved driving and made long, senseless drives—to the shore for a great lobster roll, to a neighboring state for a book he couldn’t find in town, to the city to take her to lunch—back and forth all in a day, speeding like a bandit. Plenty of traffic tickets, even a course for delinquent drivers, but no fiery crash, only an internal inferno; Flora wrong again, her ability to know the future as inadequate as her understanding of the past.
When Pat Jenkins called Flora from the hospital pay phone and said the words heart attack, words that had always sounded not physical but emotional—like a particularly acute heartbreak or an overabundance of fellow feeling, an attack of heart—she’d first been confused: car attack? Such things happened now, but on the news, not near home. But then Pat said it again, heart attack, and stressed how unexpected it was, how sudden, and the complete physicality struck Flora, the seizing, the constricting, the gasping, the collapsing. It struck her the way the ground struck her when, at age nine, she fell from the high branch on the apple tree in her backyard, “the break-your-nose branch,” as she and her best friend Georgia had called it.
Had Pat tried to reach her first at work? How did she have the number? In another life, with a different family, her mother would have been the one to break the news to Flora—to smash it, really, to cream the news. In this world, though, it was loyal Pat, the only person in the English Department her father could abide, the only one he went to talk to.
“He must have known something was wrong but didn’t want to upset anyone, so he went off to be by himself,” Pat said. “He was a gentleman till the end.”
What was he, an animal going off to die alone? A gentlemanly heart attack. A courteous coronary. How civilized. Gentlemanly. That was one word for it, Flora thought, standing in the immaculate kitchen in her childlike costume. Gentlemanly, proud, stupid, selfish—suicidal even. It bothered her that she hadn’t known at the precise moment of his death, hadn’t felt it. She liked to think of herself as someone who really knew people, a watcher, a noticer of others—particularly her parents. She knew them better than they knew themselves (better, maybe, than she knew herself). In her fantasy of herself, she would have felt his absence. She would have experienced the sudden seizing just then, been gripped by a stabbing pain in her head. She would have tripped at least, fallen and scraped a knee.
Instead, if you worked out the times, you’d find her in her apartment, inert before afternoon TV, watching an inspirational story about a woman who’d forgiven the man who viciously attacked her and left her for dead, claimed now even to love him, just as her father’s heart attacked him. The woman called the whole disaster “a real learning experience,” and whenever anyone called a disaster a learning experience, Flora wanted to stick her finger in her mouth and pretend to shoot her brains out. What did one learn from disaster? What worth learning anyway? Perhaps at the very moment of his attack Flora made her life-mocking gesture, or lifted her mug of lukewarm coffee to h
er lips, debating whether it was worth another sip. She’d called in sick to the magazine again that day, the second time in three weeks. But Flora wasn’t sick, just tired, rising from her bed at eleven-thirty, sleep-drunk. “If it’s not done by noon,” her father, who woke at dawn, had always said, “then to hell with it.”
She’d read about the parents of marines who died at war waiting to receive their son’s or daughter’s luggage, and when it finally arrived, rushing to unzip it, yearning for the scent of him or her, only to meet with the oily perfume of clean laundry, the heartbreak of erasure. It was marine policy to wash all clothes before returning them. Was that what she had done—returned to Darwin to smell her father’s smell? If so, Mrs. J. had, marine-like, washed the man right out of his house. Or had she? Flora remembered clasping her arms around his neck, long ago, in that other house in Darwin; he had just returned from playing tennis, and smelled sweetly of sweat, and of orange juice. But the only trace of citrus in the house today came from the toxic lemon of cleaning solvents, a faint note of tea leaves sneaking out from underneath. Or maybe the smell of tea was a hallucination, a wish gone haywire in the brain.
It was teatime, wasn’t it? Had she come up to Darwin to visit her father, he would have put the kettle on in anticipation of her arrival. A manic, cheerful, boiling whistle might have welcomed her as she walked through the door. There would be milk in the fridge, and he would have prepared the mugs with a thin layer of it, two teaspoons of sugar for him and three-quarters of one for her. He’d liked his tea sweet, the way she had as a child, but outgrew. He’d had a boyish love of sweets, his excitement at the prospect of a slice of cake uncommon in an adult. Had she come when he was alive, he would have made a plate of cookies—dark chocolate on shortbread biscuits, his favorites. Why had she not come to see him? Would he have lived longer if she had come?
Maggie Pouncey Page 1
