“No, I never have,” Flora said.
The tunnels had been built over a century ago, back when winter was really winter, to connect all the original buildings of the school. They’d been closed in the late sixties, during the campus unrest. Now there was only restricted access—for faculty and students with disabilities. But Flora had been in them several times in high school. Her father had a master key—a remnant from the presidency—which she occasionally borrowed for a midnight swim in the college pool in the new gym, or the exploration of a deserted dorm in hot summer. She and Esther had sneaked into the tunnels late at night to get stoned and scare themselves.
“Allow me,” Carpenter said, offering the crook of his arm.
How to read his gallantry? Why was he courting her? A post humous poke at her father? It must be unsatisfying to have your nemesis die midfight and no one win or lose or repent or forgive—a Pyrrhic victory of sorts for Dempsey. The too-soon dead-honorable, tragic—have the distinct advantage of moral superiority. But then, she might also represent a comforting, nebulous zone for him—not a colleague, not a pupil, neither insider nor outsider, in between, and thus safe. And she had sought him out, not the other way around. Chosen his out of all the possible Darwin courses. Maybe he regretted his long animus with her father and was seizing in her arrival a chance to make it up.
The tunnels were like something out of a submarine—or a submarine movie: dark and fetid, mysterious pipes dripping questionable liquid into puddles below, long sections where one had to bow one’s head to pass by. Flora remembered, dimly, pretending with Esther to be on the hunt, or hunted, crooking their elbows, hands clenched around imaginary guns, looking behind in the paranoid style. Since that time, she’d learned claustrophobia. As Carpenter wound her through doorways and sudden rights and lefts, she imagined he was leading her to a place from where she could never return. Years later her skeleton would be discovered by a student on crutches, on his way to class.
“I never found the article you mentioned. About my father’s work,” she told him.
“No?”
“I looked online that afternoon but couldn’t find it anywhere.”
“The Internet is so labyrinthine, isn’t it? Retracing one’s circuitous search steps nearly impossible. Someone should write a contemporary adaptation of ‘Hansel and Gretel’—lost online, bread-crumb bookmarks pecked away by faulty memory and malicious worms.” He looked to her for appreciation.
She smiled. “Yes, true.”
It didn’t seem quite enough. “I’m sure I don’t remember where the article was. It’s possible I heard it in conversation, English Department chatter, that kind of thing. I’m afraid my old memory isn’t what it used to be.”
English Department chatter? Was Carpenter playing games? Or was he just a fond and foolish old man? They walked and crouched in silence, and were on a long stoop-backed stretch when Flora’s gaze fell upon Cynthia, walking toward them in her wildly colorful arrangement of vest, scarf, and tights. It was an awkward space to cross paths with anyone. Spotting her, Flora extricated herself from Carpenter’s arm.
“Hello, Flora,” Cynthia called out in surprise. “How are you, Sidney?”
“We tackled Yeats today—and now we gird ourselves for Eliot.” Seeing Cynthia’s confusion, he added, “The lovely Ms. Dempsey is auditing my class. Do you know she’s never read The Waste Land? I have the privilege of introducing her. She’s interested in Pound’s annotations.”
“How nice,” Cynthia said. “You’re really settling in.” She leaned in and kissed Flora stiffly on the cheek.
“Beginning to, I think.” Flora couldn’t read Cynthia’s expression. Wistful? Annoyed? Her thin lips were stretched taut, her eyes gray and distant. Had the happy couple once walked arm in arm together through this very tunnel? Had they kissed in the shadows when they found themselves alone? Was she in the thick of a memory?
“I bought a bicycle,” Flora offered, apropos of nothing. “Since I last saw you. Though now with the snow …”
It was an uncomfortable threesome, her relationship to each uncertain, and complicated by her father. They were watching her too closely. “This is my first trip down to the tunnels,” she said. “Darwin’s underworld. I’d thought they were a myth. And really, there is something mythical about them, isn’t there?”
Carpenter nodded; Cynthia shrugged. It was not unlike the feeling she’d had growing up, post-divorce, whenever she found herself in the same room as both her parents—the fear that she would somehow make things worse, the nervous silence, the compulsive need for dull talk. Her life was a series of triangles, her father often at the helm. Maybe it came from being an only child, the defining familial structure a threesome. Wasn’t that an expression: “Bad things happen in threes”? Flora remembered her mother cautioning her against play dates with two other friends when she was little. “Threes are unstable,” she’d said. “Somebody always gets left out.” But if her mother believed that to be true, why hadn’t she done something to alter the volatile makeup of their family before it was too late?
“You’re a difficult woman to reach,” Cynthia said. “I’ve even thought of buying you an answering machine.”
“A Luddite in the digital generation—how delightful!” Carpenter was jolliness itself.
“No, not really. The old one broke. I haven’t gotten around to buying a new one.”
She had disappointed him again. “Do you two see a lot of each other, then?” he asked.
“We’re getting to know each other,” Cynthia said. “We have her father in common.”
“Yes, yes, of course. It’s nice that you have each other to lean on during this difficult time.” Neither Flora nor Cynthia responded. “I was recently thumbing through Reader as Understander,” he went on. “Quite good, quite good. It almost deserved its reputation, I think. Dempsey had a way with words, didn’t he?” The way Carpenter said the phrase, it sounded not quite a compliment, as though her father were a charlatan, a huckster.
Cynthia stood motionless, her countergesture to the chronic nods of agreement. “He was a brilliant writer,” she said.
Carpenter turned to Flora. “You know, I read some drafts of the early chapters when he first came to Darwin. He’d started it before your family arrived, then put it on hold for a few years. But I was an early encourager, telling him he had to get back to it.”
“Really,” Cynthia said. “No, I didn’t know that.”
It seemed true, sincere. Had that, then, been the source of the rift—Carpenter’s early edits?
“Do you have a minute? Can I show you something?” Cynthia asked Flora, her back to him. “It’s just in my office.” She pointed back in the direction from which Flora had come. “It’s part of the reason I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Professor Carpenter and I were just—”
“No, no, Ms. Dempsey, this sounds far more urgent. I’ll bring the book to our next class.”
“If you’re sure you don’t mind,” Flora said, anxious for one of them to be gone. “Thanks so much.”
“Right. Yes, well, if you’ll excuse me, ladies,” he said. “I have office hours to attend to. Nice to see you both.” He bowed his head and retreated. They watched him scurry, crablike, away.
“So,” Cynthia said as soon as he was out of sight. “You two have become quite chummy.” Her disapproval was excessive, as though she’d caught them together in bed. “I’m puzzled, Flora. Your father couldn’t stand that man. It strikes me as more than a little odd that you’ve chosen to study with him.”
She said “puzzled,” but she meant pissed. It was the first time Flora had seen her bite. “We’re hardly chummy,” she replied. “I thought I should know something more about poetry, for my new role, as my father’s literary executor. His was the only poetry lecture available this semester.”
Cynthia did not look chagrined, as Flora hoped she might, her expression preoccupied, as if she hadn’t been listening. They walked witho
ut speaking, ducking in unison to avoid the interstices of the school—the veins and arteries of plumbing and electricity—like navigating the inside of a body, with odors foul and strange, and knots of activity that looked destined to fail. When they emerged in the Art History building, Flora caught a glimpse of pink sky and breathed. The world still existed.
Cynthia’s office was a miniature of her living room—charmingly oppressive, the walls lined with images—though more cluttered, the desk suffocating under paper.
“Death by Turner,” she explained. “I’m at the stage where the research has completely taken over. It now has a life of its own. But don’t worry, I know just where it is.” She flung her vest on the burgundy desk chair and unlocked the oak filing cabinet in the corner of the room. From the top drawer she extracted the small leather bag Flora’s father had carried to and from campus every day of his academic life, at least since Flora had been paying attention. How had she not missed its absence in the house? The dark brown leather was worn around the edges, the threads of the handle precarious. Distinctly not a briefcase—that bulging, steroidal carryall—this bag was made to hold documents of the standard letter size, a few books, a scholar’s day.
“I stole it,” Cynthia said before Flora could ask. “The night your father died. I was deranged and I broke into the house—well, not exactly, I had a key—and I took things. I took his toothbrush, I took the navy blue V-neck sweater that he’d worn the day before, which was lying on the bed, I took his fountain pen from his desk, and I took this. I was in a daze, a frantic daze, if such a thing exists. I put the sweater on, and I shoved the pen and the toothbrush into my pockets, but I had no idea what to do with his bag, so I brought it here and locked it in the cabinet. It made a kind of sense at the time.”
The story of her derangement made Cynthia human and likable—the stealing something Flora could understand. She recognized her. “What’s in it?” she asked. From the way Cynthia held the bag, Flora saw it had greater significance than a toothbrush.
“Drafts and drafts. Drafts with many markings and annotations—some mine, mostly his. These poems didn’t come to your father in some hasty and ill-conceived spasm of inspiration, Flora. I want you to know that. He labored over them, he wrote them slowly, and delicately, and with great care, and he revised and revised and revised.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Flora said. Though really she did. She had never known him to go back; he was not that kind of writer. He wrote in his head, pacing and pausing in the hallway, and came to the page almost finished, done as he began.
“You say they’re not ready, but you see, he was ready. After months and months of fine-tuning, he felt they were finished. He’d been living with many of the poems for a lifetime. I’d read several different versions by the time he gave you the manuscript. So you see, you may not be ready, for whatever reason, but your father was.”
What was she, competing? I saw them first! Marked them with my pen! With her confession, Cynthia offered a version of herself Flora could like. But it was a false idol. She wasn’t confessing because the bag belonged to Flora and it was the right thing to do; she was pushing, furthering her publication campaign. The woman was relentless.
“You had no right to take that,” Flora said. “What, were you going to hide them away in here forever? If we’d not happened upon each other in the bowels of the earth?”
“No, I told you, I’ve been trying to reach you. What I want to say is, if he were alive right now—”
“If he were alive right now? We could spend a lifetime on if he were alive right now.”
“My point is, the poems would be well on their way toward publication. An editor whom he respected—”
“I understand your point perfectly well. But the whole point is he is most distinctly not alive right now. Which changes things, doesn’t it? If he were, I would not be here in Darwin, and most likely I would still be contentedly unaware of your existence, my father having never bothered to introduce us, and my having never read the magnum opus in the first place.” Flora hadn’t intended to admit to that, but there it was—out.
Cynthia sat as the words sank in. “That’s why you were so surprised that day when I showed up at his house. You hadn’t read them.”
“And why should I have? I am his daughter, his child. Has everyone forgotten that? Did he honestly want my critical feedback, my unprofessional opinion? On his soft-core porn and fantasies of having never met my mother? Did it ever even occur to him—or to you, for that matter—that I might find some of the content objectionable? His ecstasies at your naughtiness, and the agonies of his former married life? Was the thought that I should be able to read the poems simply as works of literature?”
“Is that how you read them? I don’t read them that way at all—no regrets or revisions. Imagined worlds, perhaps. But they’re about acceptance, finally, and forgiveness, and, yes, sex and love. Even in the poem where he imagines we’d met when we were young, he acknowledges there would be loss in that, too, that then he would not touch me now as he could in this world: ‘touch in that now no longer new.’ That’s the brilliance of his work—he’s so clear-eyed. ‘Rewriting revisionist history,’ he says, and he means it.”
“Yes, then, we read them differently.”
“I’m not your adversary, Flora. We’re on the same side. We both loved your father. We only want what’s best for him.”
“Oh, please. You want what’s best for you. You want the Odes to Cynthia Reynolds to get the attention they deserve. You want the world to finally meet the muse.”
Flora had not removed her coat, and felt hot. She had raised her voice only just, but infused it with a reduction of sarcasm that seemed to suit the accusation as well. It was a tone she had never taken with someone she did not love.
Cynthia looked stunned. Had no one ever spoken to her that way? Maybe she’d never seen the Dempsey meanness—that, too, unearned in the briefness of their romance. But she said nothing, and Flora wondered if the silence meant she had won. Cynthia pushed the bag across a clear and narrow path on the desk.
“You should have these,” she said.
It was unsatisfying to have her not fight back. If it was a victory, it was a cheap one. There were many things Cynthia might accuse her of: She was an absent daughter, never visiting; she was not her father’s perfect reader, not the reader as understander, but had read his poems selfishly; she was hoarding the poems, the house, the memorial, keeping everything his to herself.
Flora took the bag.
“I was hoping for a friendship,” Cynthia said. “That’s what I had wanted for us. I thought we’d both be grown-up enough to do that.” There it was, the dig embedded in the endearment. “And yes, Flora, you are his daughter—I’m well aware of that. No one has forgotten that. But you are no longer a child.”
In her chair, Cynthia looked small, as though she were hiding behind the papers, worried Flora might throw something at her.
“Thanks for this,” Flora said, lifting her father’s bag so Cynthia could see it. “If you’d like, I’d be happy to make you a copy.”
18
The Science Correspondent
TWO PLANS WERE SLATED FOR EARLY MARCH, Flora and Paul beginning to plan on each other: On Saturday, they would have dinner at Madeleine and Ray’s, and the next day they would drive to his father’s house for a family luncheon, his sister from the city briefly visiting.
“We want to meet this guy you’re spending all this time with!” Madeleine had said.
“I’m not spending that much time with him,” Flora argued, but she had agreed and then failed to extend the invitation, which would necessitate telling Paul about Georgia, telling Paul about herself. She’d seen the McNair-Wallachs twice since Thanksgiving, and each time had been lovely—if you didn’t count the crowd of unlovely unspeakables these cozy reunions unearthed.
At her old job at the magazine, one of Flora’s favorite things had been cutting—an article had been assigned at t
hree thousand words but an ad had fallen out, they’d lost a page, and it needed to run at fifteen hundred. She was often called upon, the other editors finding the task tedious. But it amazed her how so many words proved themselves expendable, that the story could be just as good, better even, when reduced by half. It amazed and depressed her. But the hewing itself was only pleasurable, a puzzle, a word game. If, as her father’s literary executor, she could simply cut his poems in half, cut half of them sheer away, her life would now be simpler. Still, there were other ways to cut. Secrets were a kind of cutting, silences another sort. There were many such cuts between her and Paul. She thought of the stories Cynthia had told her—of her father reading aloud while she worked in the garden—the complete image, the fantasy of companionship. It was hard not to envy. Flora did not tell Paul of her fight with Cynthia because she knew whose side he’d take. And when Madeleine asked her to bring him to dinner, it occurred to Flora she had never mentioned them to Paul.
The week before the chosen day, as they lay in his bed, not yet sleeping, she made herself give Paul the pared-down, brutally edited, clause-pruned version.
“When I was nine, after my parents split, there was an accident at the President’s House.”
Paul put his crossword aside.
“My best friend, Georgia, was badly hurt.”
“You never said.”
“I know. That’s why I’m telling you.”
He stared at her.
“She’s fine now,” Flora added. “In Mongolia, actually.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, stupid kids’ games. She fell.”
“You still don’t like to talk about it?”
“Believe me, I’ve talked about it. I spent years talking about it with Dr. Berry, among other people.”
He nodded. “Love that woman.” He wouldn’t stop looking at her. He had a way of looking at her that made her feel like she couldn’t breathe. His gaze vacuumed the air out of the room. She wanted him to say something thoughtful and benign, but he said nothing. Was her mother right that she expected people to adhere to a script? That she was too easily disappointed by what they came up with on their own? But didn’t certain announcements presuppose certain responses? Wasn’t mind reading, in times like these, a matter of being fucking human?
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