Maggie Pouncey

by Perfect Reader (v5)

  The pews were crowded to the point of claustrophobia. There was no way out. Though of course there was a way out: Her father had taken it. They were all there for him, and yet there was no him there. She was grateful to have no polished and padded coffin, which at her grandfather’s funeral had struck her as boatlike and vulgar. Grateful to have no graying face poking sculpturally out of a painstakingly chosen suit and tie. And yet. Where was he? Her father could now be stored—in an urn, or a shoe box, or a tightly sealed mason jar. In an ornamental paisley tin. It was too ridiculous. And horrifying, that one’s father, that first and ultimate model of maleness, could be reduced to something so small, so portable; could be transformed into something one could run through a sieve, become another element: from animal to mineral. Grotesque. She felt faint every time she considered what had become of him.

  The question of whom to sit with was a difficult one. One that shouldn’t be difficult—one sat with family, one was the family—but in her case was. She hovered awkwardly like an uninvited guest; she waited to be told what to do. Also, there was the question of what to do with her mother.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m here for you,” her mother told her, adding, “If you want me up in the front with you, I’m happy to do that, but if you’d prefer, I can sit in the back with Steve and Heidi.”

  Perhaps funerals should have assigned seating, like weddings. Calligraphied place cards; each row given quirky and idiosyncratic names. In the end, Flora sat beside Ira Rubenstein and other old friends of her father, Mrs. J. and Betsy and Pat Jenkins just behind. Her mother a few rows farther back. Beyond her, Flora thought she saw Dr. Berry. Her hair had gone a steely gray and grown a few inches longer, from earlobes to chin. Would they have to embrace? It had been years. Embracing might be expected. The thought of hugging her former shrink was appalling. Near her sat the new president of the college, a handsome Brit with a young family. At first, Flora couldn’t see Cynthia, but then she spotted her on the other side and inadvertently caught her eye. Had she been staring, waiting to be summoned? She came up and kissed Flora almost on the mouth.

  “Come sit with us, Cyn,” Ira said as she grasped his hand with both of her hands. “You should be up here with us.”

  Sin? Flora hadn’t realized they were such intimates. Cynthia looked to Flora for approval. It was the first they’d seen of each other since Flora told her no.

  “Of course,” Flora said.

  Out of her brilliant array of colors, Cynthia appeared older, and smaller. She was wearing a blue-gray blazer that looked several sizes too big, like a man’s jacket. Was it possible that it was Flora’s father’s jacket? That was too weird, even for Cynthia, wasn’t it? Though it was likely that he’d left things behind at her house, that pieces of his wardrobe still lived in her closet.

  The student players took their seats “up at the holy end,” as Larkin had written in a poem about a church—she knew this from her father’s quoting, not her own reading; this was how she knew most references, her references really his. The mourners stirred and hushed. The seats were uncomfortable, as they were intended to be. Around the sides of the chapel were portraits of all of Darwin’s past presidents—gray-haired men in dark robes, impossible to guess the year by the portrait, 1872 and 1972 indistinguishable. Her father’s was up in the mezzanine, where she couldn’t see it, thankfully. He had hated it, felt the artist had gone a bit Rembrandt on him. “Chiaroscuro up the wazoo,” he’d said. “And I can’t help feeling he didn’t do justice to my nose.”

  Smothered in black velvet, two women—a violinist and cellist—began to tune their instruments, releasing the mournful wail of disparate voices blindly trying to find each other. The slow movement of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, the notes of the piano quietly insistent, the thread of the music trading back and forth from piano to strings. Repetitive, though Flora liked the rolling patches of piano. She preferred music with words. Opera had been their compromise. But as she listened, she saw her father, his hand held up, palm toward her to catch her attention, his eyebrows rising with the music, his eyes glassing and spilling, and then the slow shake of his head, his pure appreciation of the skill of the thing. “The fucker could write,” he’d say, slightly embarrassed by his own emotion. “The fucker could really write.”

  He had a recording he loved of Pablo Casals playing the piece, where you could just hear Casals grunting irrepressibly at the good bits. “Did you hear that?” he’d say, his wet eyes breaking into smile. “Did you hear it?”

  Ira read from Hardy, as Flora had suggested he do. Not one of the Emma poems, as had been Cynthia’s hope (poems to a dead estranged wife were wrong for this occasion, weren’t they?), but “Afterwards,” of wanting to be remembered as “a man who used to notice such things.” Flora avoided Cynthia’s gaze, which she could feel pointed at her, as he read.

  “Yes, Lew, we do remember you that way,” Ira said, his voice straining at his friend’s name.

  James Wood talked about his scholarship, his brilliance as a reader: “Harold Bloom has written at length about ‘strong mis-readings.’ But Dempsey was interested above all in strong readings.” Bloom was himself in attendance, so Wood did not say that Dempsey had referred to the former’s famous book as The Anxiety of Flatulence. “Dempsey’s book Reader as Understander,” Wood went on, “moved readers away from narcissism. Books were not mirrors, he argued, but windows. One ought not read to understand one’s own place in the world, or the world in abstract, but to understand the individual experience of another. And even more, to understand the individual force and resonance of words. ‘Who owns these words?’ he often asked of books he read, of Hardy’s novels in particular. He better understood the intricacies of point of view than anyone. Many talk of close reading, but what interested him was close writing.”

  He called her father “vatic,” his writing “plangent,” and offered other words for which Flora required a dictionary. Even death could not dampen a scholar’s erudition; even death an opportunity to edify and exclude.

  “Those of you who knew my father well know that he surely imagined the words to be spoken on this very occasion,” she began her eulogy, releasing a nervous laugh. “And any of you who had the pleasure of hearing him speak know what a daunting task I have before me in trying to live up to his version.”

  It had taken so long to write the words on the papers before her, but all she wanted to do, up there like a bride abandoned at the altar, was sing the songs he had written for her when she was small, to share his secret words. Her father, the great nicknamer, was also an inveterate lexicographer, compiling their own private family dictionary. It had taken Flora a long time to learn that these words were not in common parlance, that other families did not say “birfus” for birthday, or “I’m having an attack of the fondines” when they felt crazy about someone. Still other words were actual words, though rare—one gave the dog a sop, not a treat or bite; one woke not at dawn but at sparrow fart, and wore not party clothes but finery. Now it was like speaking Yiddish, or some other dying language; soon there would be nobody around to talk to. All families, she suspected—unhappy or otherwise—spoke their own dying languages. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe her family—her father—really was remarkable.

  But she followed her script and told the crush of mourners that she had never asked him the meaning of a word he couldn’t define, that it seemed he knew every word ever made, and as a child she assumed that was a prerequisite of parenthood—knowing all the definitions. She told stories about summer vacations on the shore, his enthusiasm for the simple pleasures of good days—a nice sandwich, a long walk, a book, a swim, a fire. Writing the words she would speak, she had found herself again and again going back in time, to her childhood, her earliest memories, to the years before Darwin, as if those years had been real life, and afterwards something else entirely, a wrong turn, an anomaly overrunning a working system.

  She talked about his tastes. How he applauded the low as much as the hig
h, how he could narrate a commercial he loved with such relish, nearly equal to his relish for talking Larkin. How he had such confidence in his own views (“So-and-so is only partly right in thinking …”), how she often had to remind herself that what he was offering was an opinion, and that she was entitled to disagree, and, in fact, he loved it when she did. Where did that come from, that academic certainty about ideas, the total lack of intimidation in the land of thought? She had written too much, and almost wanted to skip a page, but she read to the end, and when she sat down, Ira nodded at her with what looked like approbation, and Cynthia’s cheeks were wet and shining and she squeezed Flora’s hand with her damp hand. But Flora felt embarrassed and exhausted and miserable—had she talked for too long, and too much about herself? Had she simply indulged her inexhaustible appetite for sentimental childhood memories, remarkable only for their very commonness? Would her father have been disappointed that she was not herself more scholarly, more vatic? She had put a foot wrong—many, many feet wrong.

  The old bricks of the rounded ceiling of the chapel had begun letting go and one had nearly brained the chaplain, so a gauzy netting had been hung overhead to catch them. It looked insubstantial, like mosquito netting. Why not instead restore the bricks and shore them up? It seemed demoralizingly like Darwin to give in to entropy like that, to let them fall. As the tuxedoed a cappella group Flora had worshiped in the early days took their positions, sounded their pitch pipe, and broke into the old Irish song her father had so loved, “Will you go, lassie, go? And we’ll all go together,” Flora imagined the bricks releasing themselves in a single God-like gesture, plummeting through the nets, pummeling one and all, death begetting still more death, and when she let out a sob, she surprised herself, and Cynthia reached right up and put her arm around, pulling Flora toward her, cradling her in the crook of her narrow arm and rocking her gently in the surging harmonies.

  Then it was over and there were endless arms and hands, holding her, touching her, squeezing and patting, offering what they hoped to be comfort but which made Flora feel soiled and bruised. A blur of weepy faces—why were they all crying? It was her father, for God’s sake. Sudden death was not a learning experience; it had not made Flora larger-souled, or kinder. It had made her jumpier, like a feral cat, ears twitching at fresh movements and unseen noises. “Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for coming,” she told the hands and arms, the salty cheeks. “You spoke so wonderfully,” they told her; “he would have loved it.” What was there to say to that? She’d invited it, invoked it, she supposed. “Thank you,” she said, “thank you for being here.” She’d never been so thankful in all her life. Thank God there was no reception.

  Madeleine and Ray presented their unified front, clasping not her but each other.

  “You’re a hell of a girl, Flora Dempsey,” Madeleine said.

  What did that mean?

  “Not girl, young woman,” Ray corrected.

  And Flora’s eyes spilled over again and her nose would never stop running and she felt small and childlike, crying so freely among the adults, and Madeleine gave her a pack of tissues from her purse and they left.

  “I wasn’t expecting to see them here,” her mother said, appearing behind her. “They’ve finally forgiven you, after all these years?” Then she added, “How are you holding up? You okay?”

  Flora wanted to be alone, alone with her father. She wanted to talk to his coffin, confide in his grave—there were good reasons for these things she lacked. She hadn’t yet decided what do with his ashes. She didn’t like the idea of spreading them, of scattering him. Who wanted to be scattered or spread thin? She would bury them, one day, if ever the ground thawed, alone, like Antigone burying her brother—another reference she’d learned from him.

  “Why didn’t you tell me there was a woman in your father’s life?” her mother asked, angling her head toward Cynthia. “C’mon Flo, you know how they say the wife always knows? Well, it’s true of the ex-wife, too. Even the ex-wife always knows. I could spot your father’s type anywhere. Wolfish. I know his type better than I know my own.”

  Flora was distracted by a batch of students.

  “How’s Larks?” one asked. Her father, who’d taken the dog to class with him, liked to say, “He’s very big on Hardy. Weak on Rossetti, but big on the Hardiness.”

  “Your father was such a great mentor to me,” another claimed.

  A third, who insisted they’d met, insinuated himself: “If you need help with anything, anything at all.”

  “Thanks,” she said. Why not just be frank and say “Fuck off”? If ever there was a moment to get away with it.

  Her city friends told her she was beautiful, and so strong. “I don’t think I could have handled that if I were you,” one said.

  “Call us,” said another. “We miss you.”

  Her mother moved in the direction of Ira and Cynthia. She and Rubie had liked each other a great deal, but her father had gotten him in the divorce. Could he now be her mother’s friend, her father gone? They greeted each other with a hesitant kiss on the cheek and fond faces. Ira started to introduce her to Cynthia, and the dean of admissions stepped in and blocked Flora’s view.

  Change came fast once it came. Boxes packed, the rental house found, movers scheduled in days. Flora and her mother were moving five blocks away. Five blocks—an inconsequential, horrifying distance. Their last move, from the city, had happened gradually, every household object contemplated before it was lovingly swaddled in bubble wrap, the choice of what to keep and what to give away deliberated, piles made and analyzed. This move was hurried and careless; things were broken in the process. As her final stand, Flora’s mother burned the white bedspread she’d bought on the day of their arrival in the fireplace in the living room, though the June air was sickly sweet and hot. Flora watched the molten strips of cotton drifting toward the chimney as though possessed, and thought, She’s going to burn the house down. Don’t let her burn it down. Please, let her.

  But divorce was not discrete. Divorce kept happening. Her parents didn’t love each other. When her mother got mad, Flora would ask, “Do you still love me?” and her mother would say, “I still love you. But I don’t like you much at the moment.” Flora only returned to the President’s House on Tuesdays. Tuesdays were the only day of the week that hadn’t changed—Flora and her father back at Ponzu, sometimes with Georgia, her mother in the city being analyzed. All other nights it was her and her mother alone together in the normal-size house, which would have seemed huge a year ago but now seemed small, the two stories furnished sparsely with tables and chairs from the third floor of the big house, a reenactment of their old apartment in the city, which was somehow the place where they’d all lived just a year before. Sometimes Flora imagined that her father had died. That was why she saw so little of him.

  If she had to choose between her two parents, whom would she want to die? And between her parents and Georgia? She could not imagine life without her mother. “You don’t get to choose—you’re not in charge,” her mother would tell her if Flora voiced these deliberations, which she tried not to do. “Take it from someone who has spent a lifetime wishing people dead. There’s no harm in it, but there’s not much of a future, either. You’re not that powerful.” But Flora feared she was that powerful—more powerful than her mother. If she had not moved to Darwin, what would the world look like? Would her parents still love each other? Would no one ever run away from school? Would the Flora in the city be generally more sophisticated, taller?

  That summer, there was terror in unexpected places. In school she’d been going through a literature of atrocities phase. All the girls in her class had gone through it, swapping and devouring the school’s little library of Holocaust books. They traded books about young girls paralyzed by drunk drivers, abandoned by parents, abused by older brothers. The terror in these books was their allure. But in the new house, the books turned sinister. Flora read I Am the Cheese and then made her mother rea
d it and swear to her there was no way, under any circumstances, their family would end up in the witness protection program. She saw the movie The Incredible Shrinking Woman—a comedy?—and worried that her mother was growing incrementally and imperceptibly smaller, that one day she would fit inside a cage, like one of the gerbils or mice in Georgia’s room. How could Flora know which terrors existed within the realm of possibility and which without? Previously unimaginable things had happened in brisk succession. The plausible had ceased to be—if it had ever even been—knowable.

  The thing was that life had been hard before. There’d been weeping; there’d been fury. People said, “That’s life,” when something unfair or unfortunate happened. Did that mean life was bad even when it was good? “Who said life was fair?” her mother had said before when Flora complained about the smallnesses of badness—an early bedtime, a denied play date. Now she also said, “God breaketh not all men’s hearts alike,” not because she believed in God, but because she believed in heartbreak.