“That’s a little low, isn’t it? You really don’t think your friends love you and want to know how you are?”
“I suppose both impulses could be in play.” Was that low, or was it true? Was she right, or just depressed? Her thoughts appeared clear, and lucid—she could see through everyone. But perhaps what she was seeing was her own foul mood reflected back like lights in a mirror. “What do you tell them?”
“I say you’re not quite up for talking, but that it means a lot to you that they’re checking in and that you’ll be in touch soon. You will be in touch soon, won’t you? Otherwise, maybe you could cut a small portion from your large inheritance for your poor old social secretary here in the city?”
“You’re shameless.”
“On the vulgar matter of coin, and the matter of your father, I suppose I am.”
“Have I lost my mind, is that what’s going on here?”
“You’re doing fine,” her mother said.
“You don’t sound quite convinced.”
“One day at a time, Flo—like the alcoholics.”
“I’m glad you brought that up—I’m seriously considering it, alcoholism. Seems a logical next step, doesn’t it? The New England way—stoical self-destruction.”
“Don’t go Protestant on me, Flora. That I can’t take. And don’t make me come up to Darwin and rescue you.”
“No, no. No interventions needed yet.” Mrs. J.’’ sedan glided into the pool of light that was the driveway. “I’ve got to go, Mom. The dog’s here.”
“Tell Mrs. J. hello from me. Tell her I still use that ironing-board cover she made me all those years ago.”
“But you don’t. As far as I know, you don’t even own an iron.”
“I most certainly do. You really are a revolting child. Who brought you up?”
“Good-bye, Mom.”
She watched through the kitchen window as Larks, released, bounded toward the door, his black-and-white body frantic, his excitement uncomfortable. He could not keep all four paws on the ground. He knew better than to bark—her father never stood for that—but he let out an almost squeal. It seemed cruel to open the door, to meet such anticipation with the disappointment that was herself. But Larks was happy to see her. She squatted down, the screen door against her back, and he burrowed his cool nose into her hair, her hand, her lap.
“Larks,” she said, holding his two plush ears in her hands like ponytails. “Hello, Larks.”
When she’d first met the new puppy, she’d asked her father, “Isn’t it pretentious to name your dog after a poet—and such a depressive one at that?” She’d told him, “He looks more like a Fred to me.”
“Are you kidding?” her father had said. “This dog has the soul of a poet. This dog understands the vicissitudes of the human condition.”
“Boy, is he happy to be home,” said Mrs. J. She sagged with shopping bags. Flora stood quickly to help and the dog ran into the house, tail wagging, in search.
“So good to see you,” Flora said, taking two bags and kissing Mrs. J. on the cheek. She smelled of breath mints. The plumpness of her skin was peach-soft. She was in her sixties, around the same age as Flora’s father, but had always seemed both younger and older than he—less worn, but of another generation. Only the hair around her temples had truly grayed, and her small roundness gave her an air of permanence, of invulnerability. “You haven’t aged in however many years since I saw you last,” Flora told her. “Really, Mrs. J., your DNA ought to be studied.”
“Almost two years now,” Mrs. J. said. “You look just the same, too, Flora. Just as you did as a little girl. Your dad always said that.”
“I’m not sure it’s a compliment at this point.”
“Oh, it’s a compliment. You’re still too young to know it, but it’s a compliment.”
Mrs. J., short for Jankowitz, had cleaned house for Flora’s family, or for her father, for two decades, since they first moved to Darwin. She’d been there, through it all, straightening up. They held the doors open for each other and dumped their bags by the fridge. Flora cleared her dinner dishes to the sink. It was suddenly embarrassing to be eating breakfast at night.
“What’s all this?” she asked of the bags.
“Some food for Larks. A few little things for you. I made beef stew. I remembered how much you loved my beef stew back when I used to babysit. Remember that? I put it in a few containers—you can freeze them. Have them as you like.”
Flora’s eyes stung; her throat stabbed. Kindness took its toll on the body. She nodded, and they silently loaded the containers into the freezer.
“And noodles. I got a few packages—it’s good with these egg noodles.”
Mrs. J. had bought three big bags of dog food, which she carried one by one over to the pantry closet. Larks had returned, expectant, and stood watching his food as it moved across the room.
“You’ve done too much,” Flora said.
Mrs. J. stopped and stared at her. “Please, Flora,” she said.
“He gets one scoop in the morning, and a scoop and half a can of wet food at night,” she went on. “Do you want me to write it down for you?”
“No, no,” Flora said, but she did anyway.
“I guess I should be getting back,” Mrs. J. said. “Told Mr. J. I’d be back in a flash. But I’ll be stopping by. To see you, Flora, and Larks.”
In all the years, Flora had never met Mr. J., though she’d seen pictures and knew he existed. The family theory had been that he’d struck upon some undeserved good luck when Mrs. J. agreed to have him, though Flora couldn’t now remember why.
Flora walked her outside. The sky was quilted with star cover. “You’re the best,” she said, and she bent to embrace this almost grandmother, this woman she’d once known so well.
“Flora—your father. He was so good to me. So good. They don’t make men like him anymore. I hate to say it, but they don’t.”
Flora tucked her hands into the sleeves of her sweatshirt and hugged her arms around herself.
“That girlfriend of his,” Mrs. J. continued. “That Cynthia. I have to tell you, I don’t care for her. From the beginning, I didn’t trust her. I didn’t like it when she was alone in the house. I felt she was after something, from him, from your dad. Can’t say what it was—his money, maybe, the house?”
“My dad seems an unlikely target for a gold digger,” Flora said. “A bronze digger, maybe.”
“I’m telling you, Flora, I don’t care for her at all.”
It was one thing for Flora to dislike her father’s girlfriend. But Mrs. J.? Was Cynthia actually unlikable? “I just met her, so it’s hard for me to say.”
“I know, I know. And I don’t like to trouble you with any more than what you’ve got on your plate already. But I thought you should know. Just keep your eyes open.”
“Okay,” Flora said. “Thanks.” She was suddenly exhausted. Leave me alone, she wanted to say, she almost said. Leave me.
“Like I said, I’ll be stopping by, checking in, seeing if you all need anything.”
“Thanks again, Mrs. J.,” Flora said. She felt she needed to say more. “It’s a comfort to know you’re nearby,” she added.
“I know it is, sweetie. I know.”
Back inside, Flora headed for the guest room. Her father’s television was nearly as old as she was, and if there had ever been a remote, it had long since vanished, so flipping the channels required standing by the box and stooping to press the tiny up or down button. Flora stooped; she pressed. America was obsessed with rejection. On one channel, there was a show where, one by one, girls were rejected from a career in modeling. In another show, each week a new family got the ax for not having quite a miserable-enough life—almost, but not quite. In a third show, young women were gradually and systematically rejected by a man they had just met who did not, it turned out, want to marry them.
Did Flora share in the national fervor? She had rejected her father, not visiting him in Darwin, and th
en not reading his manuscript of poems when first he gave it to her over breakfast at the diner—wandering the papers, instead, around the desert of her apartment, from bedside table to desk to drawer, simultaneously fussing and neglecting, handling them like a fetish she must be cured of. Even now, she rejected him by not wanting to read them, exiling them to the body bag, rejecting her role as his chosen reader, the one he trusted, his executioner. She’d rejected her mother, and her friends, and her work—everything she left behind in the city so hastily, as if she’d been waiting for the chance to leave them all along. And now she’d rejected Cynthia, whom she had just met, regardless of whether she could be trusted or not, by saying no, there was no room for her in the memorial service, or her father’s house, no room for her in life or death.
On the shows, the moment of rejection was stretched out to the most awkward extent possible and saved for the very last minute of programming, as though it were a reward held out to viewers for getting through all the optimism and pluck of the previous hour. The rejected one usually cried, his or her face crumpling into wrinkles of injury and despair, but so did the ones who had been narrowly spared from rejection for one more week—whether out of malice or relief, empathy, love, or fury, it was hard to tell.
Flora, watching, cried, too. She had a hard time not crying when she saw other people cry, as if her face were a mirror. Was that all she was? The thought was troubling. But then, it was a relief to cry, to in fact weep. To sit on the floor beneath the blue daze of the tele vision and weep. “Did you cry?” her father had once asked her after some insignificant childhood mishap, some bike or tree unfooting. “Did I cry? I weeped!” Flora had told him indignantly. It had become a family story. She did not cry; she weeped. She cried so hard, her mouth grew dry, her tongue hurt. She cried as she’d cried as a child, alone in her room at the President’s House, making ugly, desperate noises, her face hot and wet, the dog standing above her, slowly wagging his tail, watching her with interest, head atilt, waiting.
Later, sapped and waterlogged, she retreated to her little room with the cordless telephone and the phone book—her links to other human beings, but also, each in its own way, a reasonable weapon against the skull of an intruder, should the need arise. Her city cell phone, now permanently off, received spotty service in her father’s house anyway—service was spotty in Darwin in general, a metaphor for its disconnection from the larger world. If the would-be intruder thought to cut the phone lines, she’d have no way to call for help. She and Larks would be on their own.
What Flora needed was expert advice. Her fellow literary executioners and Plath and Joyce were of no practical use. Her father was not Plath or Joyce. But even when an early Plath poem had lately been discovered by some graduate student rousing long-slumbering manuscripts, it had birthed only limited curiosity. Flora knew because she’d read about the incident in the library. There was no such thing as a poem heard around the world. But still, her father had been a prominent scholar, of the Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler crowd—the triumvirate of pop poetry criticism, could there be said to be such a thing. It was not unthinkable that Lewis Dempsey’s poems could prompt limited attention, too, whether they were any good or not.
She needed to consult someone who knew things. Paul something—something Welsh, or Scottish—that was her father’s lawyer; he had drawn up the will. He’d put everything in order, officially documenting and organizing her father’s death. A former student was as much as she knew. A Darwin English major turned attorney. She opened the phone book to the business pages in the back. The last name started with a B, or a D. In the D’s she found “Davies, Paul, Esq.” It was nearly midnight, but she would just call the office while no one was there and leave a message, while she was thinking of it. But a man answered on the first ring.
“Oh,” she said. “I must have dialed the wrong number.”
She was about to hang up when she heard the man say, “Who are you trying to reach?”
“A lawyer. I’m sorry if I woke you. I thought I was calling an office. I was going to leave a message.”
“Is this an emergency?”
“No, no, I was just hoping to make an appointment. Please accept my apol—”
“You have called a lawyer. This is my office.”
“Who is this?” she asked.
“Who is this calling?”
Had she stumbled upon some pervert who now wanted to play late-night phone games with her? “Listen, I really am sorry to have disturbed you. I’m going to hang up.”
“This is one of the stranger phone calls I’ve ever received,” the man said. “Let’s start over. Hello, this is Paul Davies.”
“Really? That’s whom I was calling. I was assuming no one would be there, I was going to—”
“Yes, leave a message, but here I am. Who is this?”
“This is Flora Dempsey. My father—”
“Sure, Lew Dempsey. One of my favorite clients. One of my favorite teachers. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Was he? Thank you.” Almost no one called her father Lew—her mother, Ira Rubenstein. In the mouth of this stranger, it sounded overly intimate, intrusive, crass.
“A great guy—a legend in town.” He paused. “What can I do for you today, Ms. Dempsey?”
Today? Was it even, officially, one day or another? Was the lawyer always this preemptory? Was he working against a major deadline? Or had she caught him mid-tryst? “Flora, please,” she said. She was not prepared; she was in her pajamas. “Why don’t we make an appointment for another time. I’m just hoping to ask your advice on a few details of the will.”
“What sort of details?”
“Details maybe isn’t the right word. More overview, I guess.”
“All right, overview of what?”
“These things I’ve inherited—the house, the writing. Mostly the writing. I’m not sure what to do. But it’s late, and I feel I must be keeping you from something important.”
“It’s pretty straightforward. And you’ve caught me now. Why don’t I run through what I’d tell you if you came in for an appointment.”
“If it’s no trouble—”
“As literary executor, essentially you are a stand-in for your father vis-à-vis his work. So, in that capacity, you may be asked to sign contracts or grant permission, or you may choose to edit a piece of his writing in anticipation of publication. But the extent of your involvement is entirely up to you.” He paused, as though waiting for confirmation that she was following. She muttered in compliance. “It’s presumed by the designation that your interests will be in line with his—with what he would have wanted for the work.”
“Is it?”
“That’s the assumption, yes.”
Her interests primarily concerned not reading her father’s work. How would that have squared with his? Surely there were former students like this know-it-all on the line—worshipful, ambitious, and far more capable—her father might have appointed to the job. When had he first chosen her from among all the possible literary executors? When had he said, Flora, it must be Flora? Had he said anything to Paul Davies about why he wanted her? She wanted to stop him now and ask him. But Paul was still explaining—a barrage of legalese, and not what she wanted from him. She wanted him to tell her that her father had said how wonderful she was, how sensitive, how she was such a good reader, and a good daughter. She wanted him to say that her father had left behind detailed instructions enumerating his expectations. She wanted him to say she didn’t have to do anything, that there was a caveat in the will, or a mistake. She wanted him to say that as it turned out, her father wasn’t dead after all. She watched the hands of the clock on the bedside table meet as though in prayer, pointing at the ceiling.
“The biggest hassles for a literary executor usually occur when there is a separate heir—the heir’s and the executor’s interests may be at odds, financially speaking,” he was saying. “But since you’re both executor and heir, your situation is relati
vely simple.”
Was that supposed to be reassuring? He’d said it so cheerfully. Executor and heir. Both. Her new, symbiotic, bipolar identity. Why had she admitted ignorance to the lawyer? Why had she even bothered asking? She was old enough to know not to make phone calls in her dead father’s house in the middle of the night.
“It’s like the estate,” he blazed on, an assault of information and analogy. “You’re in charge of the house now, and in that capacity you can choose to remodel or leave it sitting empty, or you can put it on the market to sell. As I said, it’s entirely up to you.”
Was he patronizing her? Would he have said the same, with such perfunctory pep, to Ted Hughes had he called for a consultation on Sylvia’s poems? “It’s that easy?” she asked him.
“Legally speaking, yes.”
Legally speaking, financially speaking. She knew his type. She could easily picture this man—he sounded young and undeservingly self-confident—a bully in his khakis, his white monogrammed pressed shirt now untucked as the single concession to the hour. Everything was neat to guys like him, the perfect soul-killing jargon holstered and at the ready. Life a series of logical legalities, spread out before him like an illuminated path to heaven. A man who comforted himself with his old, annotated paperbacks of Beat poets, who at cocktail parties with other lawyers talked about how Naked Lunch had changed his life. Had her father really trusted this man with his will, with his death? Will—it was a funny word. This is my will. I will it to be so.
Now all she had to do, according to this legal expert, was guess the most private hopes her father might have had vis-à-vis a stack of poems he wrote in the last year of his life without ever showing or telling anyone other than her. The relatively simple task before her a mere matter of deciding whether they were ready for publication, and, if not, how to make them so. And then, of course, there was the correspondence, the early drafts, the speeches from his presidency, the essays from his forty-year career, the whole of his life in letters, now, impossibly, hers. Executor and heir. She had it all.
“Ms. Dempsey, are you still there?”
Maggie Pouncey Page 6
