Flora smacked the faucet off and joined Cynthia at the table. She hoped her face looked as though her surprise were only very slight.
“But for how long?” she asked.
“Nearly a year.”
Flora inspected her burn. That wasn’t possible. That much she would have known. That he would have told her. Why wouldn’t he? It hadn’t gone well with his girlfriends in the past, but Flora was an adult now, allegedly, where she hadn’t been then. She hadn’t then been capable of civility. Now, for the most part, she was. Then, none of the women he’d introduced her to had seemed serious or plausible. This one was clearly different. One of the others had hung lace underpants like ornaments from doorknobs, and sprinkled nude photographs of herself alluringly throughout the house. On an overnight visit, Flora had stumbled upon one tucked into a hand towel.
“Is it hurting you?” Cynthia asked. “Your hand?”
“I think I’ll live,” Flora said. She sipped her coffee. It was undrinkable.
“You’re surprised,” Cynthia said. “I really didn’t mean to drop this on you.”
“No?”
“Of course, I realize I have dropped it on you,” Cynthia stammered. “I just want to know you, Flora. That’s why I’m here. I thought you might have suspected he was—”
“Very much in love?”
“Maybe I should go. Give you some time. We could talk later.”
“You know, he never mentioned you,” Flora said.
“He was waiting for the right time.”
Flora laughed a short, harsh laugh that made her throat burn. “Yes, well. What a good plan.”
“I think he would have wanted you to know, wanted us to know each other.”
“It’s hard to know what he would have wanted, isn’t it?” Flora stood and picked up her coffee with her good hand and dumped it in the sink.
Cynthia winced, again almost tearful. “I’m hurting, too,” she said.
“I’ve been rude,” Flora said. “It’s just—who knew my father was such a man of secrets?”
“He was protecting you.”
“From what, you?”
“He felt you were unhappy, going through something.”
“Did he?” She hated to think of her unhappiness discussed, and pitied. Cynthia, the expert, who had known so much, while she knew nothing.
“Do you need any help, Flora? Can’t I help you? With the house, or anything?”
“The house?”
“I spent a lot of time here over the last year, and I know how much work an old house can be. The roof was starting to leak. Your dad was planning—”
“No, really, I’m fine.”
“You’re doing everything alone?”
“Not entirely.”
“I’m not sure if this is the best time for me to ask—or if there even is a best time—but I know you must be in the thick of planning his memorial service, and I’ve been thinking I might like to read something, if you wouldn’t mind too much, if you felt there was room for me. I was thinking one of Hardy’s poems of 1912 and ’13. You know, those hauntingly beautiful, haunted poems about the death of his first wife. Your father loved those poems. He loved reading them aloud. He even mentioned wanting them as part of his funeral. You know that funeral-planning predilection of his.”
“Yes, I know,” Flora said. “Ira Rubenstein is reading Hardy.” She lied, without deciding first to lie; she had no idea what Ira would read. “You know Ira, I suppose?”
“Yes, I know Ira. That makes sense. Hardy is the natural choice, of course. Do you know which one he’s reading?”
“I can’t remember. I can find out and let you know.”
“Well, if it’s not the one I was thinking of …”
“It would be difficult to move things around at this point.” This suggested firm plans were in place. Cynthia’s input would no doubt be useful, make Flora’s life easier. Sharing often made life easier.
“If there ends up being anything I can do, please, Flora, you’ll let me know, won’t you?” Cynthia stood up to leave. “You’re staying here, in town, for a while?”
All her questions were phrased as demands.
“Yes. For now,” Flora said.
“Oh, good. I hope we’ll see each other again soon.”
Flora tried to smile.
“We could talk. We have so much to talk about.”
Just that morning, there had been no Cynthia Reynolds, no other woman; her father had sent her a communiqué from the beyond after all. “Yes,” Flora said finally. “I’m sure that we do.”
Cynthia left, walking herself to the door and closing it behind her, and as she did, Flora moved to the garbage can and retrieved the answering machine, wiping it off with a dishrag, though it was quite clean—there was nothing else in the trash. She plugged it back into the wall. She was afraid unplugging it might have erased the messages, but there it was, the number 3, appearing to her like a beacon. All three messages were from her, from Cynthia. The first warm, eager, loving: Lewis, I thought we were meeting at six-fifteen. Did we get our signals crossed? Call me, love. In the second, the voice lifting to a crescendo of concern: Darling, it’s quarter past seven. I’m worried now. You’re never late. Please call as soon as you get this. The third introducing a new, tentative voice, less fond: Hello, Flora? This is Cynthia Reynolds. I’m a friend—I was a friend of your father. I just wanted to say hello, and to see if I could stop by the house and offer my condolences…. I’ll try again later.
Flora unplugged the machine and returned it to the trash can. Was that what she had done, offer condolences? It hadn’t quite felt like it. Flora needed air. She opened windows, one-handed, to let the cool air into the house. She needed to call her mother, who would be worried by now. She needed to read; there was so much reading to do. Her father had left her an assignment, she’d inherited homework—his essays and reviews, his new, secret poems. Well, thanks, Dad. Just what I wanted. How could he not have told her? Was she a child, best kept in the dark? She’d been too depressed to withstand his happiness? It seemed unlikely; she doubted thoughtfulness had been the true root of his withholding.
She grabbed the thick green woolen blanket from the back of the couch and went outside and climbed into the hammock, which hung on the edge of the yard between two tall, near-leafless maples. She cocooned herself in the blanket. The irregular fall moon sat low in the sky, pale and sheepish at its early arrival. A breeze came up and sent the fallen leaves panicking across the lawn. When she was little, Flora never understood how a hammock could be relaxing. It seemed vulnerable, on the verge of collapse—foolish. She hadn’t then been afraid of heights, or dares, or other things she should have been afraid of, but she’d been afraid of hammocks. Now, as she let her body sink down, she felt herself floating up, untethered. At the very least, she’d progressed on the hammock front.
Cynthia Reynolds, her father’s girlfriend. Or, what word did one use at their age? Partner? Lover? How revolting. Though there had been the occasional other person, neither of her parents had remarried (or not that she was aware of). “Your mother cured me of marriage,” her father had told her once, long ago, a pithy little phrase she tried to unhear, to unremember. In life, he had not wanted his daughter and his lover to know one another. So how could Cynthia say that in death his mind would change? And it was nervy, wasn’t it, insinuating herself into the funeral planning—“You know that predilection of his,” she’d said smugly. He’d never mentioned those Hardy poems to Flora. Though it was true that her father had planned his own funeral—casually mentioning over a meal a particular piece of music he’d like played, or whom he would or would not like to speak. When years back a famous pianist received an honorary degree from Darwin, her father cheerfully announced, “We hit it off. I’m sure he’d be willing to play for me. When I go, try to track him down.” Though the man had been older. Why had her father assumed he would be the first to die? And, as it turned out, the pianist was busy, booked already on th
at date in December when the memorial would be held, a concert in Berlin, though terribly sorry to miss it. Her father was an exceptional man, et cetera, et cetera. Making the arrangements was now an act of recall. Which Beethoven trio had her father preferred? What was it he said about the dean of students? Why had she not taken notes? Worse, she had tried not to listen. She’d said, “Dad, can we please talk about something else?”
It was her mother who remembered—though Flora worried her information was out-of-date. It was the Archduke Trio. And it must be performed live. The conductor of the student orchestra could recommend the best players. The dean of students should be discouraged from eulogizing. Ira Rubenstein would be too distraught to read his own words, but he could choose some other text. The idea of her mother planning her father’s funeral was wrong; he wouldn’t like it. But Flora did need help, and she didn’t want Cynthia’s. Who else had known him so well? And her mother wouldn’t sabotage his funeral, would she? Or would she? The brilliant final act of revenge: the wrong music, the wrong words.
What had life been like, in the city, before Georgia? Flora could not remember life before.
“They’re in love,” Flora heard her mother say to Georgia’s mother, Madeleine, in a laughing voice, a mocking voice.
“I know,” Madeleine said. “It’s the sweetest thing.”
But it was true; Flora loved Georgia with the full ferocity of her eight-year-old feelings. Georgia, an only child, too, accustomed to occupying long hours alone—reading, inventing homework assignments for herself, tending to the small furry creatures whose aquariums lined the walls of her bedroom—accepted Flora’s ardor gratefully. She slept over at the President’s House most weekends, the bottom bunk of Flora’s new bunk beds quickly hers. They spelled out their names in glow-in-the-dark star stickers across their respective headboards—labeling, claiming—FLORA and GEORGIA.
“Like sisters,” everyone said.
But they weren’t sisters—for starters, they looked nothing alike: Georgia with her bark brown bob, her warm smudgy eyes, her roundness of face, and Flora, even then angular, her ever-darkening blond hair in braids nearly to her waist, her mother having decided the experience of forcing her to trim them was one not worth repeating. Yes, Flora and Georgia were both only children, but the similarities between their families ended there. Georgia called her mother Madeleine and her father Ray and they all had the same last name, McNair-Wallach, each parent taking a small but essential part of the other as their own. Hyphenated last names were big in Darwin, like tofu, and recycling, and Flora found their collective hyphenate—the outward manifestation of the mutuality of their merging—annoying. Flora’s mother had taken her father’s name, but he had not taken hers, and she liked to say, seeing her full name in print, that it made her feel like an imposter. “Who is that woman?” she’d ask coyly, examining an envelope addressed to her. “Have we met?”
Flora and Georgia were not sisters: They were better than sisters; they were partners in crime; they were spies contriving ways into the neighbors’ houses; they were invincible and indivisible. The President’s House—the setting of their romance—invited gamesmanship and danger. A mansion invites make-believe, makes pretense and delusion easy. Living there, Flora imagined she was a princess, with almost no effort. And just as effortlessly she imagined she was an orphan, and a runaway, and a prisoner. She and Georgia played hide-and-seek, of course, and Pollyanna, a game loosely modeled on the Hayley Mills movie, in which Flora was a paralyzed saint and Georgia her devoted nurse, pushing her around the long hallways on the large red leather desk chair with its sticky wheels, their roles always the same—Flora the brave invalid, Georgia the patient caregiver. With the Ghost Game, they created a complicated world, in which the giant portraits in the foyer of Darwin alumni of minor historical note came alive at night and the girls became tour guides, shuttling big groups of no one through the house as though it were a ghost museum, inventing and narrating the biographies of the men in the paintings, what they had done in life and what they did when they returned from the dead. One of the paintings, above the staircase, a life-size, full-body portrait of an officer in the Civil War, with an elaborate uniform and a sword taller than Flora, wandered around murmuring, “Have you seen my horse?” The staircase itself, with its darkly gleaming mahogany banister and a landing as long as a hallway, invited jumping contests. They would jump down, four, five, six steps at a time, hurling their bodies onto the itchy beige carpet below, Flora pushing—“Just one more”—and Georgia hesitating—“Maybe we’ve gone high enough for today.”
When they tired of contests, they invented rides. Flora’s bedroom had two doors, one leading to the hallway, the other to her father’s study, and she and Georgia would each climb onto the doorknobs, hoist themselves up to the tops, and sit there and swing back and forth, each on her respective door, talking for hours until they heard the footsteps of approaching adults, and they would throw themselves to the ground, bruising, scuffing, laughing. Many of Flora’s childhood memories involved hitting the ground hard—hitting the ground was one of life’s daily realities. Rug burns standard; scabs eternal. Jumping from stairs, doors, trees, bicycles. Looking back, one’s childhood body seemed so resilient and catlike, bendable and unbreakable—or almost so.
Together, they played Annie. They were orphans escaping from the orphanage and the tyrannical Miss Hannigan. They climbed out the window on the third floor to the ladder that ran along the side of the house—the old fire escape Flora’s mother had declared off-limits, barring any actual emergency. Gripping the metal rungs, the chipping black paint scratching their palms, they climbed down, slowly, carefully, hand under hand, tentative foot below foot, all the way to the ground, and then they climbed back up, into the sky, and then down again, and up, and again, and again, as though they were rewinding a tape, each time risking anew discovery, and capture, and death.
3
Literary Executioners
THE CROSS COLLEGE LIBRARY was named for the wealthy Darwin alumnus who financed its building in the 1960s, but it was often mistaken for some sort of religious institution at the center of campus, and once, in the ’90s, protested by a group of Jewish students who refused to study in a shrine to Christian iconography. This was where her father’s first editions and rarer books would be moving as soon as Flora went through and packed them up. She remembered visiting the library as a child in that first year in Darwin, and looking up her father’s name in the most recent volume of Who’s Who in America. There he was, listed and defined in the encyclopedia of Americans. Her father was a Who. He existed not only in the world but, indelibly, in print. Important people existed in books.
Now she was there for him again, this time to research literary executors, the elite fellowship to which she had newly been appointed. Research, in Darwin, had to be done elsewhere. The house was not equipped. Her father lived without technology, and so Flora lived without technology. He had never even had an e-mail account, or at least not one he checked. He’d been loyal to his Smith Corona portable, shunning the computer with impressive tenacity. A cell phone was as preposterous to him as a handheld refrigerator. “Why bring the inside outside?” had been his line on people listening to music while jogging or walking their dogs, back in the early days of the Walkman.
Though Flora hadn’t visited him, her father had come to the city every few months. He’d stay with Rubie, who lived nearby, meeting Flora for eggs and bacon at the diner near her office before she went to work, and taking her to dinner and sometimes the opera after (always the Italians was his rule, and preferably Verdi), these occasions strangely datelike—the heightened excitement of a special occasion, the dressing up, the one-on-oneness. The post-divorce romance one has with one’s parents. “We haven’t put a foot wrong,” he’d tell her, patting her hand, as they waited for the curtain to rise, “not a foot wrong, my Flora-Girl.”
It was on the last visit that he’d given her his poems over breakfast.
&n
bsp; “Appallingly rough,” he’d told her before handing her the folder agape with words he had written. “Some good bits, though, I think.”
She’d asked if anyone else had read them yet, and he’d shaken his head.
“You’re the reader I trust most.”
A flattering phrase she repeated in the privacy of her mind.
It was enjoyable, being in a library. It had been a while. The design was universally acclaimed: dark wooden beams punctuating tall, thick walls of glass—at night it was said to glow like a paper lantern. Libraries often smelled of ignored dust and generations of book crumbs, but this one had a pleasing air of sterility. A few stoop-shouldered students read nearby, foreheads folding into books as though study were an act of osmosis, while Flora trolled the Internet for stories, many of which seemed more the stuff of fiction than of life and death. She read of Ted Hughes’s zany spinster sister, who’d built a fortress around her brother and Plath’s poems; of the obsessive and controlling Joyce heir, bane of scholars and Bloomsday fanatics alike—a professional ruiner of all Joyce-related fun; of J. R. R. Tolkien’s kin, still writing his father’s books; and of Dmitri Nabokov, with his jaunty conversations with ghost dad. Apparently, good old ghost dad thought his son should publish, and profit.
Were they all crazy before they filled the role of executor, or was it the post-death nomination that had unfurled, flaglike, the full neuroses of those familial relations? Executor—it sounded much like executioner. I am his Literary Executioner, Flora thought. The Lord High Literary Executioner.
It was a paradoxical position: at once powerful and subservient, generous and greedy. To control someone else’s free expression—a power one should never hold. How muddled protectiveness and professional jealousy could become. Was it better to share everything, or was that slatternly? The impossible requirement of reading, among many, many other things, the mind of the dead—what would he want? Writers wanted readers, no? That was why they wrote. But what sorts of readers did they want, and at what point?
Maggie Pouncey Page 4
