“Oh, back at the house.” The little lie easier than explaining.
“Sports scores,” Gus went on. “We spent a lot of time on that. He liked to talk games, and to hear them recounted. We filled each other in on what we’d missed.”
Her father had been famous in her family (if one can be famous among two other people) for the enthusiasm with which he offered meticulous plot summaries of films and books. The telling often took longer than the watching or reading. Most of all, he loved to reveal surprise endings. “Are you planning to see it?” he’d ask. An answer of “Yes” was clearly wrong—disappointing, and a little rude.
“How long are you staying?” Gus asked.
“Not sure. As long as it all takes, I guess.” An evasion, but Gus nodded.
“You’ll let me know if you need anything, I hope.” He awkwardly handed her the bag. “It’s on me, Flora.”
“Don’t be silly—how much do I owe you?”
“No, I mean it. Don’t say another word. You know how your dad always overpaid. When he said ‘Keep the change,’ too often that meant change for a twenty off twelve dollars of tennis balls. I owe him.”
“This once,” Flora said. “Then we call it even. I pay my way or I stop coming back.”
Gus grinned at her. “You’ll be back. This is Darwin, Flora. Where else will you go?”
Leaving the shop, Flora thought she saw Esther Moon—a lost friend from high school—parking. Flora recognized the car first—an enormous, old, weirdly symmetrical Chevy, like a child’s drawing of a car, the ugliest car ever made, Esther had liked to say. She’d bought it for one dollar from a Darwin historian who’d been desperate to be rid of it. The car couldn’t still be alive. It couldn’t have outlived her father, was Flora’s thought. But then, there was a car seat in the back, with a child inside, a further impossibility. Esther Moon could not be a parent. A friend Flora considered more responsible had gotten pregnant the year before at age twenty-seven, and a part of her had been shocked to find it not a scandal requiring adult intervention and furious gossiping. When had pregnancy, of all things, become acceptable? And even if that mother were Esther, talking to her now, answering questions like “How are you?” was not an option. Flora didn’t know how to answer the standard questions anymore: “How are you?” “What are your plans?” “Where do you live?” For the time being, all were stumpers. Easier not to be asked. She’d never understood with those questions anyway how much honesty people wanted in return.
She decided on the long way back, through campus. The air was cool, but fresh. The leaves were down and gone, but the grass on the common clung to the last of its New England green. She could see the tall rhododendron bushes barricading the President’s House, but she crossed the street and walked toward the quad instead. An eerily peopleless landscape: Where were the students? Where the professoriat? But what did she want? She dreaded chance encounters with people she’d once known—those warm smiles of recognition homing in on her, missile-like—but then she felt disgruntled if she made it through without being sighted.
In town, in Darwin, she’d always been daughter-of. It was all, when it came to her, relative. A strange thing, recognition by association. At once flattering and diminishing. Teachers taking attendance on the first day of school asking obsequiously, “Are you, by chance, related to Lewis Dempsey?” Flora reddening, nodding, conceding: “My dad.” The recognition more embarrassing even than those unpronounceable hyphenated names so many of her classmates had been saddled with. “This town won’t be the same without him,” Gus had offered. Was that true, or something one said? Her father had a prominent place in Darwin as president, and then president emeritus. As scholars went, he’d been known; “a populist critic” he’d been called by admirers and detractors alike. His first book, Reader as Understander, tracing the history of how poetry—from Shakespeare to Stevens—was read in its day, sold well, and not just among rivals and graduate students; it won awards and accolades; it had become a book club favorite. At once learned and mass-market. People who did not read poetry had read his book, or at least bought it. Within the confines of the town, her father’s life had been quite public, and so his death had been public. A sudden, public death made people vulnerable, aware of the risks of living. No one liked that kind of awareness, or the people who provided it. Who knew, they might be contagious. Perhaps the town was relieved he was gone, the last of the Dempseys finally purged—though there she was, another one popping up like a rogue mushroom that refuses to be rooted out. Or was all that just narcissism? Again: self-important or self-deprecating? Was the notion of being reviled more palatable than the thought of being, like so much in life, simply tolerated? To most people who had known her father, his death was likely like any other—a cause for sadness, but sadness on the normal scale. The town would be the same for them.
It had been over a year since she’d returned to Darwin, though weeks ago she’d come close, as far as the hospital outside of town, with her mother, to see the body. She had needed to see him, needed to see that he was really dead. Her nerves jittered, like she didn’t know the etiquette. Hysterics seemed appropriate, but didn’t arrive. As her mother stood beside her, she tried to remember the last time the three of them had been alone in a room together. A long time ago, another life. It was uncomfortable—it had long been—to have the two of them in the same place, and she didn’t like her mother to see her father not looking well. Perverse, but that was her thought. His body, to his neck, was covered with a half-blanket, half-tarp, and his neck and earlobes were ruddy from—the recognition impossible to avoid—freezer burn. But it was her mother who had touched him first, who put her hand on his hair in an affectionate way and said, “Oh, Lew,” as if he’d gone and done something truly unreasonable, and so Flora saw that she could press her mouth to his forehead and feel the terrible coldness of his changing skin and not regret not having done it.
“Do you want to be alone with him?” her mother had asked, and Flora told her no, and then she asked, “Do you want to cut a piece of his hair?” and the thought of asking the staff for scissors filled Flora with worry, as if they might suspect her of some barbaric act, but it turned out her mother had a tiny pair in her purse, and she cut the hair, which was a soft gray that moved toward a yellowish white, and still wavy—her mother said that, “Still wavy,” and Flora had been thinking the same thing, though why still, why would death have straightened his hair out? And Flora had signed the papers she needed to sign and they had turned back around, back to the city, away from Darwin.
There was the Darwin College chapel—an imposing stone fortress, its delicate white steeple like an ill-fitting cap—where in a matter of weeks his memorial would be held. The same chapel her parents had brought her to as a child to hear the undergraduate a cappella groups perform their wildly harmonized renditions of “Yesterday” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The same chapel that held the annual holiday Vespers, in which celebration Flora, a self-declared agnostic from the age of six, had once read a short excerpt from the Gospel of Luke. The same chapel where her father had hosted academic forums on “The Poet as Prose Artist,” and “The Fin de Siècle.” Fantasy Echo, she had misheard at the time, and assumed that was an important term of poetry: the fantasy echo. Like a chorus or refrain, but more mysterious and ghostly. The same chapel where he had mourned other dead scholars over the years—and yet not the same: those memories long layered there less convincing now the eulogizer was to be eulogized. Had it really been he who’d done such things, who’d been there all along?
He’d been a wonderful speaker. Witty and canny, with the easy appearance (though a false one) of off-the-cuffness. He always prepared. “He could work a room,” her mother would put it. But that was unfair. He was the same with everyone he met, and this authenticity radiated, and pulled people in toward him. Flora felt herself so changeable, and found that quality in him miraculous. She even felt she looked different from day to day: Something about he
r face hadn’t yet gelled; her self hadn’t gelled. To be so constant, so reliably oneself, what would that feel like? Was yourself something you became? Had he been like that—himself—even at her age?
Flora wound her way around the two oldest dorms, built in the early 1800s, North and South (“Here” and “There,” her mother had called them), humble redbrick twins, and down to College Hill, which offered the best views of the mountains and, in winter, the best sledding. A dip at the foot sent you flying above your sled and then, at the moment of reunion, thudding painfully back to earth. As a child, the pain had been part of the fun, falling under the category of pain/pleasure, like a loose tooth you trouble with your tongue, or like the time she and Georgia had given themselves paper cuts, tracing the lines on their palms and fingers till they were red and raw.
Her father had been a mountains man when it came to views-Flora went more in for oceans. He’d loved this hilltop and walked here with Larks most mornings. The range ringing the valley that was Darwin was densely wooded with bands of late-fall orange amid swaths of evergreens. Flora was struck by its ruggedness, its wildness. Even cushy Darwin could seem remote. Going to the country was like going back in time, seeing how the world looked before it changed.
A windbreakered father and daughter appeared beside her, he with a camera strapped around his neck, she with the eager expression of a college hopeful. He asked if Flora would take their picture before the view.
“Are you a student here?” the father asked as they posed together, inches of green and orange visible between them.
“I love it,” Flora said, lowering the camera.
“A beautiful campus,” he said. “And quiet. Everyone busy studying, I guess.”
“Or sleeping off their hangovers,” Flora said.
The girl released a nervous, knowing laugh. The father reached for his camera.
Down the hill, on the old clay tennis courts, two well-bundled men Flora identified as assistant professors were hitting stiffly back and forth in the chill, as if their primary goal were to move in the smallest radius possible. What day was it? She was losing track already—not hard to do in Darwin. On the other side of the courts was the small wooded area with the path running through called the Bird Sanctuary, where she had gone on gloomy walks with her father as a girl, and on the other side of the Bird Sanctuary stood the small house she had shared with her mother after they left the President’s House. A grim walking tour it was. The assistant professors waved—not necessarily out of recognition, but because waving was the done thing. She felt a sudden urge to perform for them—to do a cartwheel, or to lift her clothing and flash her breasts, to shock, to make a fool of herself. But she’d exhausted suddenness. She simply returned the wave and then turned and followed the road back toward her father’s house, a walk her father had taken countless times on his way to and from the courts, until his knees betrayed him a few years back and he’d had to stop playing. She could see him in his ancient sweats, the racket held at his side, rising every so often to map out a stroke. It was as if she had done nothing her whole life but make a study of his movements: her father shaking hands—a slow, graceful greeting, not at all the firm spasm meant to convey power; throwing his head back in laughter as he tried to get through a joke he loved; reading while walking from car to house, anticipating when the slate steps began and reaching for the handrail without lowering his book; listening to music—choral, orchestral, surging—holding his hand up as if to draw her attention to the surge, transported, nearly tearful; staring at her mother in overt contempt. And now here they were, the images, reminding her of all she’d learned. What she had to show for the long work of growing up.
At the side of her father’s house stood a woman, tall and thin, peering in the kitchen window. She turned at the sound of Flora’s footsteps. She was well into middle age, sixty maybe, with sharp features and veins of gray in the red hair that hung around her shoulders, wearing a green scarf, a purple vest, and sensible-looking Mary Janes. Had a five-year-old dressed her?
“Flora?” the woman said, approaching.
“Yes?”
“I’m Cynthia Reynolds. A friend of your father. I heard I might find you here—I ran into Mrs. J. I’d left a message yesterday, but then thought I’d just stop by.”
A message. In the garbage can. There had been three messages.
“The machine broke,” Flora said. “Finally. The thing was a relic—I’d given it to him years ago and—”
“It’s really so lovely to meet you,” Cynthia said. She wasn’t interested in the machine. She was searching Flora’s eyes, searching for him, maybe. But she wouldn’t find him there. It appeared she might cry. She looked down at her feet and said, as if by explanation, “I only just arrived.”
“How do you do,” Flora said, and shook her hand, as Cynthia’s eyes moved past her, into the house. “Won’t you come in?”
“Please.”
Cynthia hung her vest on one of the hooks along the wall by the door, next to one of Flora’s father’s well-worn Darwin College sweatshirts: a familiar, almost proprietary act. To get to the kitchen they each had to step first over the body bag, rather rudely unzipped in the middle of the floor. Her father’s manuscript poked out of the opening, and Flora threw her coat down over it and kicked the suitcase out of the way.
“I was just going to make some coffee,” Flora said.
“That sounds lovely.” Cynthia moved to the kitchen table and sat down, unbidden. But of course he had friends. Friends who spent time here. He had a life. A life with other people in it.
“You also teach at Darwin?” Flora asked as she filled the kettle with water. Someone had to speak, and it was a safe starting point. Almost everyone who lived in Darwin taught at the college, or that was how it felt. It was like Hollywood, a one-industry town, though less glamorous, and possibly meaner.
“Yes, art history, nineteenth-century European,” Cynthia said. “You look so like him, you know?”
“No,” Flora said. She wished she had bathed. Did she still smell of bus and sleep? “Actually, I look like my maternal grandmother. The family joke was that all her genes were dominant, like everything else about her.”
“Oh, I see a strong resemblance.”
“I think you’re the first.”
“Modiglianiesque,” Cynthia said, undeterred, smiling warmly. Her teeth were even, and small, and stained. “Long-necked, long-bodied. I always thought he was, and you certainly are.” Always? She always thought? Cynthia followed this bold observation by turning shyly to stare out the window, apparently down to the flower beds below, where moments before she had stood outside, looking in. As comfortable as she made herself in the house, her movements were nervous. She fussed with her hands, which Flora noticed wore no rings. She stood up. “Can I help?” she asked, and sat down again when Flora told her no. She did not want help. Though Flora wasn’t sure with her father’s coffeepot—a retro hourglass beaker, waist cinched in a stylish belt of wood and leather—how much coffee was enough, how much was too much. She erred on the side of undrinkably strong, piling the grinds high into the filter.
Cynthia Reynolds watched. Flora was sure she’d never heard the name. Sin-thee-ya. It didn’t sound like the name of an academic. It was the name of a flight attendant, or a soap-opera star. Perhaps she was a Reynolds of foil fame. An heiress.
“I’m so sorry,” she was saying, her voice shaky. “This must be such a difficult time for you. It’s a difficult time for everyone who knew your father.”
“Yes, thank you.” Was she suggesting they had equal claims to grief?
“He spoke so lovingly of you. He adored you, as I’m sure you know. He told me he thought you were his best work. He quoted that old Ben Jonson poem where he calls his son his ‘best piece of poetry.’”
“Better even than his introduction to The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy?” Flora joked, though it came out wrong—bitter and ungrateful. It was her turn to fidget. She grabbed the mi
lk from her bag of groceries and found the sugar bowl in the cabinet. By not returning to Darwin, not visiting her father, she’d stripped him of all context. He’d existed only in her world, an irregular weather pattern that passed through her neighborhood every now and then, a rare mood. Of course she hadn’t known when he died; she hadn’t really known when he did anything. When had he had the house painted? And when had Cynthia sat at that table across from him?
The kettle whistled, and Flora turned off the stove and reached for the handle.
“Fuck,” she yelled, recoiling. It was a copper kettle, a copper handle, and scalding, requiring a pot holder to lift.
Cynthia was beside her in moments, the cold water on and Flora’s hand being led toward it. A pot holder retrieved from the nearest drawer. The coffee beaker filled with water. Every gesture smooth and efficient and oozing knowing, and only when her tasks were complete did she say, “That must have hurt.”
“I’m fine,” Flora said, though a blister was forming on the soft pillows of her fingers. Ha! Her fingers were vulnerable. She’d just been wrong about the how. She would not cry in front of this woman, this stranger who knew where everything was. “It’s a new kettle. I didn’t know.”
“Yes, I’m sorry,” Cynthia said, as if it were she who had burned her. Cynthia opened the cabinet and pulled down two mugs and a little blue pitcher. She poured the milk Flora had bought at Gus’s into the pitcher, poured the coffee into the mugs, then took the mugs over to the table and sat down.
“Were you and my father close?” Flora asked above the rush of the faucet.
“We’d begun spending time together.” Cynthia squinted at Flora, examining her.
Did that mean dating? Did that mean sleeping together? “Were you romantically involved?” The stiff euphemism of a sentence the simplest to say.
Cynthia paused. “We were very much in love.” The words burst out of her, as though she were a child with a secret, as though not saying them right then would have been impossible.
Maggie Pouncey Page 3
