Maggie Pouncey

by Perfect Reader (v5)

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good. I’ve always loved Thanksgiving, since my girlhood. I was the eldest of five, so it was a huge affair.”

  The eldest of five. As an only child, Flora regarded the idea of siblings with fascination, in the way she found mythical creatures fascinating—as though they occurred only in art, or other cultures. Growing up, Flora often fantasized about having a sister—part rival, part ally. A sister would be nice right now, today. If she had a sister, one of them could keep Cynthia distracted while the other searched the house.

  “What was that like?”

  “Oh, the family? Noisy,” Cynthia said. “Complete chaos.”

  But Flora could see she did not want to go back in memory, or not that far. “Were you and my father planning to celebrate the holiday together?” She was an investigative reporter, trying to uncover, to verify, to retrace.

  “We hadn’t talked about it, but I’d assumed we were, since he said that you would be with your mother.” Flora watched as Cynthia’s eyes filled with tears. “I miss him terribly,” she said.

  Was this openness, as Madeleine had suggested, an act, a cover? Was it a ploy to get at what she was after? Or were they all too guarded, too closed to recognize a certain kind of innocence when they encountered it? Flora wondered if she should reach out to Cynthia, put her hand on her arm or shoulder, say something kind.

  “I know,” she said. It was the best she could do, but it was quite enough for Cynthia.

  “I’d never been married, never had children,” she said. “I’d lived my whole adult life alone and I was used to it, good at it even. But when your father and I … He broke me of the habit, and now, here I am in my sixties and suddenly, for the first time, I’m no good at it.”

  Cynthia, in profile, looked a little like Flora’s mother. The Lewis Dempsey type, maybe. Joan would not be caught dead in Cynthia’s wardrobe, or in her perfume, and she would say that Cynthia’s living room made her feel the walls were closing in on her, but they shared a look—narrow, smooth-skinned faces, boldly featured, light-eyed. Both of them beautiful, but their beauty unexpected, something you didn’t notice right away.

  “Did you and my dad talk of getting married?”

  “Oh, Flora, we hadn’t gotten there yet.” Cynthia placed her cool hand for just an instant over Flora’s hand. “At our age, romantic notions of marriage seem slightly preposterous. Perhaps we would have done it eventually, but then only for practical reasons.”

  Flora said nothing. She knew enough to know that practical reasons meant money. Was that what Cynthia wanted from her—her father’s money? Did she feel she had earned it, that she was owed an inheritance of her own?

  “I guess marriage is not in the cards for me. Not now,” Cynthia said. “But what about you? Is there someone in your life?”

  Is there someone in your life? A terrifying question. “No,” Flora said. There was no one in her life, no someone at all.

  An awkward silence seeped into the busy room.

  “How do you fill your time—since?” Flora asked. This seemed to her the quintessential question, the part of life she hadn’t been able to sort out. Filling time. Spending it. How was it done?

  “Oh, I’m working on a book, nearing the end. On Turner. And I’m teaching, and students have a way of filling up one’s time. I have friends I see. This and that. Most of all, I wish it were spring. I love to garden. In spring and summer, I’m always in the yard, kneeling in the soil. Last summer, I spent a lot of time in your father’s garden. I keep feeling all of this would be made a bit easier if I could just spend Sundays in the garden.”

  Flora’s father, Cynthia explained, would read out on the lawn chair or the hammock, and keep her company while she worked, calling out passages when something seized him. To Flora, such scenes had a whiff of servant and master: Cynthia kneeling, digging; her father reclining, edifying. “Didn’t he ever help you?” she asked.

  “Oh, of course he helped, gathering my weeds and prunings, tidying up after me, and he was always offering to do more, and I would show him how to do certain things. Most of all, he loved learning the names of plants. You know how he felt about proper nouns. But it wasn’t work for me, discovering a new garden like that. I didn’t mind at all. I loved every minute.”

  “I was wondering who’d been tending those flower beds,” Flora said. “They look like they were lovely.”

  “But what about you, Flora? What are your plans?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have any plans.”

  “That’s probably wise. For what it’s worth, people keep telling me you shouldn’t make any big decisions or life changes in the first year after you lose someone.”

  Flora hated that phrase. Lost, passed, passed away—the passive euphemisms of grief. She hadn’t lost anything. Something had been taken, not lost. “It’s a little late for me for that advice,” she said. “I mean, I’m here. I seem to have left my whole life behind and moved back to Darwin.”

  “You did what you had to do,” Cynthia said quickly. “Your father would call such bromides ‘psychobabble’ anyway.”

  “Yes, he would.”

  Cynthia shook her head. “At moments, certain expressions—you’re so like him, it’s scary.”

  Flora blushed with pleasure. Funny how the thought of being like one’s parents could be simultaneously a source of dread and delight. “Really?” she asked.

  “Yes, really,” Cynthia said. “I used to get a little jealous, you know. The way your father spoke of you. The long phone conversations you two would have sometimes after dinner.” She seemed to read Flora’s expression and paused. “I know how strange it must be for you, that I was there, in the background, through all that.”

  “He was the only person I liked talking to on the phone,” Flora said. “His phone calls were like great letters. You know, notable anecdotes described in careful detail. No How’s the weather—unless it was relevant to a story—no Have you taken care of such and such? Just good stories. You’ll never believe whom I ran into … and he was off.” To be able to remember him with someone else who had loved him was rare and new. She smiled at Cynthia for the first time since she’d arrived.

  Cynthia stood up abruptly and disappeared down the hall, as though the smile were the signal she’d been waiting for. Her footsteps hurried past the little bathroom. A light went on. Flora could hear a drawer opening, then closing again. When Cynthia returned, she held a stack of papers in her hand. She pushed aside the orchid and placed them on the coffee table in front of Flora.

  “I’ve been dying to talk to you about them,” Cynthia said. She was beaming. She looked like the proudest woman on earth. “Aren’t they exquisite?”

  “I’m sorry,” Flora said, staring at her. “What?”

  “The poems,” Cynthia said. “Your father’s poems.”

  In spite of all the evidence now before her—the papers, Cynthia’s face, what she slowly recognized to be an inscription in her father’s handwriting across the top of the first page—Flora could not bring herself to believe that Cynthia knew of the poems’ existence, that she possessed them, that she had read them. Flora was his one and only reader. She was the one he trusted.

  “I know your father gave you a copy,” Cynthia said. “He was so eager to know what you thought of them.”

  A copy? Flora looked more closely at the inscription: “For my darling Cynthia,” it read in a twilight blue ink, “without whom these poems never would have been. L.”

  “What did you think of them?” Cynthia pressed.

  “I didn’t know,” Flora said stupidly. “I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about them with you.”

  Cynthia looked down, wounded. “No, of course not,” she said. “I understand.”

  “I’m just surprised. I didn’t realize.”

  “I shouldn’t have sprung this on you,” Cynthia said. “I seem to keep doing that.”

  Flora wanted to reach for the stack of poems, Cynthia’s p
oems, to touch them, to mess them, to hear that sound fingers make against paper, but she didn’t trust herself; she felt as though her hands were shaking. She clasped her fingers together and pressed them into her lap.

  “But I should tell you”—Cynthia was beaming again—“I’ve spoken with an old friend of mine, an editor, and I sent him a small sample of the poems, and he’s quite interested. He thinks they’re eminently publishable—that’s what he told me.”

  Flora stood up. Those were her poems. Her father had left them to her. “It’s late,” she said.

  “Yes.” Cynthia picked up the manuscript. “We’ve made it through this holiday. This long, long day.” She walked Flora to the door, clutching the poems to her chest. “He’s a wonderful editor. He’d be so right for your father’s work. Truly. I think you’d like him a great deal. And whenever you’re ready to talk, Flora, I’ll be here.”

  “Good night,” Flora said.

  She drove slowly through the empty streets of Darwin. No one, it appeared, had anywhere to be but safely ensconced in their snug country houses, giving silent thanks for their good fortune. Except for the occasional upstairs light shining optimistically into the night, most of the houses were dark, her own destination the darkest of them all. She went in, and without turning on the lights, she found her way upstairs, Larks padding after her. In the body bag on the floor of the room called hers sat the poems. She grabbed the bag and took it into her father’s bedroom. She switched on the lamp and opened the folder. There was no inscription on her copy, and looking closer, she noticed what she hadn’t seen before, that it was just that—a copy.

  Gemlike. Subtle and spare. Startlingly original. Timeless. The commonplace rendered miraculous. The miraculous in the commonplace. Astonishing depth. Vividly realized. The ubiquitous blurbspeak of poetry, the extravagant clichés, the lexicon like that of wine—silly and bewildering.

  But how to describe a poem? Flora had stayed up all night reading and rereading the poems in her father’s bed. Such intimacy in reading—how closely one attended to the words on the page, more closely than to the words of troubled intimates. How one felt one knew a writer when reading—and yet, when one did know the writer, how distancing the reading could be. How troubling and infuriating. It had been jealousy, finally, and not loyalty, not love, not even duty, that inspired Flora to read. If Cynthia had read them and knew them, Flora wanted to know them better. There was power in knowing, a loss of power in not knowing. “Who owns this kid?” she’d once yelled to her mother while at the playground in the city, before Darwin, the small offender having gotten in her way. Who owns these poems? That was the question now. “For my darling Cynthia,” her father had written, while telling Flora she was the reader he trusted.

  We want to know our parents’ secrets, their lives before and beyond our own. But then to know can be terrible. To know is to want to not know. After so much worry about how the poems would sound, what they said came as a shock. The content surprised her most of all, and the content was Cynthia. Cynthia was the Eve of Darwin’s Garden, though she was not Eve-like at all. She was open and honest, boldly aware of her own nakedness. Her nakedness was described with care—Flora read with interest and shame. One knew one’s parents had bodies, used them even, and yet there it was on the page in her father’s handwriting, his thoughts about his body and others’, thoughts Flora felt she shouldn’t know. Certain things children should not know.

  It had been his way of telling her—of telling her rather too much—about Cynthia. She might have known about the happy lovers for many months if only she had read the manuscript. No wonder Cynthia had been so unprepared for her surprise, her confusion. For whatever reason, her father had been unable to say, “I’m very much in love,” but instead had handed her the fertile product of his romance and asked her to read it. He must have found it rude, or odd, that she never said, “So, who’s this woman, Dad?” That she said nothing at all. But then he hadn’t asked, or even mentioned the handoff that had occurred that morning at the diner before she went to work. It had been as if it had never happened. And perhaps that had been the point: If I don’t read these poems, or mention them, then maybe they will cease to exist. But they existed. More than existed. They throbbed unappetizingly with life. This was why Cynthia loved the poems. Who would not love to see herself so portrayed? Cynthia the revelation; Cynthia the rescuer.

  In one poem, “The Gardener,” he watches her planting bulbs: “Impossible in her palm in their crinkly tunics.” Flora remembered the word tunic from her days on the gardening beat. Of course he would have found the noun, upon learning it from Cynthia, irresistible—the very word for the thing and yet possessing an innate poetry, an innate metaphor. Crinkly, too, was winning—one heard it, like grabbing an onion. When he stuck to the word for the thing, he was good. But later, with Cynthia, he got into trouble. Reassuring, almost, to see the self-centered silliness of romance was not ageist. New love, no matter when, made one see the profound in the ordinary—the miraculous in the commonplace—and not in a good way.

  He imagines the two of them meeting years earlier, when they were young, when she was still a girl, her body “serpentine, unbitten; the bulb below my ribs not yet ripened.” Had he not realized what was undone under such revisions? For example, Flora? Better to have Cynthia from the beginning than to have had Flora at all? And her mother, beyond being erased, became the emblem of all that had gone wrong, fifteen years of marriage reduced to a regrettable error corrected only with the second coming of love, the Edenic Cynthia, the post-apocalyptic redemption of sins past, the clean slate, o brave new world, the wonder and rightness of it all, at long bloody last. If her father had lived, these paroxysms might have come to seem overdone even to him, but he had not lived, and so their passion was poised and immortalized in the state of perfection, in the state of poetry. Surely he would have gone over that stuff again, cleaned it up—surely he would have. He would have: the tragic conditional. Who knew the man was such a thoroughgoing narcissist? Poetry as memoir. She’d heard him say so-and-so was not a novelist because his novels adhered so closely to his life; did all the self-serving autobiography, then, make her father not a poet? Or were poets exempt from such distinctions, as they were from most cares of the world? Flora had been wise not to read the poems. What good could ever come of having read them? What good to her, that is. Her mother could never read them.

  It was not yet nine the next morning when she called Cynthia, but she got the machine, the intrepid gardener already in the loam somewhere.

  “Cynthia, hello, this is Flora Dempsey. I’m afraid I’m going to have to say no, as my father’s literary executor, to your friend the editor. Please do pass on my regrets. The poems are simply not ready for publication. But thank you so much for the gracious offer to help.”

  Winter

  11

  A Man Who Noticed Things

  SHE WANTED TO LOOK NICE FOR HIM. Her mother’s advice was to wear something she didn’t mind never wearing again. That made sense, but then, did it mean wear something ugly? And she still didn’t like to defer to her mother’s ideas of dress. Flora wanted to wear something beautiful, and serious. She continued to care about clothing. She continued to care about the way she looked. Death had no impact whatsoever upon her vanity.

  Days before his memorial, she walked into town, to the shop she’d bought her prom dress in a decade ago, a store filled with floor-length gauzy dresses in a spectrum of colors meant to be ethereal, all in the sorbet family. The dresses were unchanged by the years. It was amazing to reflect on the rainbow of proms—all that virginity lost and alcohol vomited, friends betrayed and parents deceived, all that ordinary high school triumph and disaster—that had kept the store so long in business. Three high school girls were trying on strapless or strappy gowns for the winter formal. As Flora browsed the racks, she met eyes with one of them in the mirror. She was tall and busty, with a swimmer’s broad shoulders, and had on a champagne-colored slip dress that
suited her long blond ponytail, cut on the bias, and slinky.

  “You look great,” Flora told her. “Fits like a dream.”

  The girl flashed a look of shy longing, an almost cringe. “I love it so much. But my mother will never buy it for me.”

  “Too sexy?”

  “Too much money, too little fabric.”

  Flora laughed. “So often the way.”

  The idea of wearing any of those dresses to a funeral was absurd and offensive. Feeling a voyeur, she made herself leave, though she had wanted to stay, to talk to the girls, or listen to them talking to one another in their semiprivate language of nicknames and personal jokes. She wanted to sneak them money for that perfect dress, to honor the way one feels at that age that the perfect dress might change your life. Who knew—maybe it could. Other small things had been known to change lives.

  The black silk cocktail dress she’d bought years before for a life she thought she was heading toward but somehow missed along the way, that she’d folded into the body bag for her return to Darwin—she would wear that; this was, no doubt, the occasion for which she had packed it. It was Audrey Hepburn–ish, with a high neck and little cupped sleeves, cut just above the knee, with a slight sheen to the dark fabric. Serious, and beautiful. The morning of the memorial, in the dress, Flora tied her hair back and brushed blush on her cheeks, though she rarely wore makeup. She was reminded of the nights at the opera with her father, their dates, as though the memorial were their final date. What was that about, dressing for one’s father? Another Freudianism best left unexplored.

  At the chapel, a long line of downy winter coats stood quietly in the hush of new snow, waiting to gain entrance. The students were on break, exams ended, but many had stayed behind in Darwin to attend. They sat in cliques in the mezzanine, the young men touching and nervous in their ties, the young girls tearful, as though he had been their father. It seemed the whole faculty, from assistant to emeritus, even Madeleine, with Ray beside her, had come. Her father’s editor from The New Republic had flown in from Washington. Gus Simonds was there, and Paul Davies, sitting with a group of young men with beards and glasses and ironic, ill-fitting suits—his fellow Apostles. Were Paul’s hiking boots lurking down below? A carful of Flora’s friends had driven up from the city, as had her old boss. Her friends looked like elegant aliens, slinging their oversize city bags. What were they thinking? What had they missed by signing on to be here in Darwin? Flora remembered attending the funeral of the sister of a boy she knew in high school and feeling all the appropriate sadnesses—weepy, vulnerable, sympathetic. But also envious. She’d envied the boy the drama of the occasion. He was so clearly one of the stars of this big event; his life had seemed bigger than hers. Did her friends now begrudge her this moment? Flora hated them for feeling what she imagined they felt. She waved but did not approach.