Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

  “If you’re doing their grammar homework, God help them.”

  Dolly let out a loud, horsey laugh. She seemed unoffendable. There was something appealing about her resilience, at least, or her ability not to take herself too seriously.

  As they drove, Florence took in the passing streets. Domino’s pizza, Starbucks, Subway. Everything here was the same as everything everywhere else. This was something that Florence felt she was supposed to deplore, but she found it comforting. These were all businesses you could find on the Upper West Side.

  She’d once spent a week in the country, during a brief relationship with a nature-lover, and it had been the most horrifying week of her life.

  “Why a pen name?”

  “Excuse me?” Dolly said.

  “Why do you use a pen name? Do you have something to hide?”

  “I do have something to hide. Myself. I have to hide myself from my mother.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s a mountain. My mother the mountain. She terrifies me. She looms over my life.”

  “That must be difficult for you.”

  “It is difficult. It’s very difficult. Even though I can recognize irony, and I understand that you don’t really give a damn, it’s nice to talk about it anyway. I’m writing a memoir of my family life, actually. I’m not sure if I should try to publish it now under Alice, or wait until my mom is gone and do it under Dolly. I’d rather publish it now, but when I go on TV, that would be the end of my secret identity.”

  “When you go on TV?”

  “I have a lot to say. I’d expect it would be a hit. I don’t know if they’d want me on Charlie Rose or anything, but I’m sure some of the morning talk shows would be interested. I’ve really got a fascinating story.”

  “How old is your mother?”

  “Sixty-seven.”

  “You might have to wait a while.”

  “I know.”

  Dolly kept glancing over at her, smiling shyly.

  “What is it?”

  “I know this is going to sound weird, but you remind me of my mother. She even kind of looks like you. It’s amazing the way she’s kept her figure. She’s always emailing me these articles about diet plans. And she has this . . . she seems angry all the time. Not that you seem angry. Or if you do seem angry, it’s about the injustices of the world. She just seems angry because, you know, I don’t call her enough.”

  “I promise not to get angry at you because you don’t call me enough,” Florence said.

  At the synagogue, there was a nice crowd. Florence gave her talk, read a little bit from her book, and answered questions. There were some intelligent women there, asking intelligent questions, mostly about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the subject of the longest essay in her book. They seemed to dislike her—Stanton, not Florence; they seemed to see her as essentially masculine in her insistence that each of us is fundamentally alone.

  After the event Dolly drove her to her hotel.

  “I can’t tell you how moved I was by your reading. I really can’t tell you how much it meant to me to have you up here.”

  “Thank you, Dolly.”

  “A lot of the things you said really resonated with me on a personal level. Some of the things you were saying were just like things I say in my memoir.”

  “That’s a nice coincidence.”

  “I think you’d really love my memoir. I really think it would move you. I showed part of it to Cynthia Ozick when she was up for a reading last year, and she loved it. She told me I should publish it right away.”

  “Did she?” Florence said.

  “Yes. I know that you and she probably don’t get along because of your opinions on the Middle East, but she possesses a first-rate literary mind. Wouldn’t you say that?”

  “Yes. I would.”

  “I also showed parts of it to Alice Munro. She’s—I can’t believe I even met her. She’s like the Meryl Streep of literature. She didn’t have time to take it home and read it, but she read a little bit in the car, and she said I should keep going. You know, I have a copy in the trunk. I keep it with me so I can keep revising it—if I get to the dentist’s office and they tell me that he’s running late, I can just run out and get it and work on revising it. So it has some stuff in pencil in the margins, so it’s sort of precious to me, because it’s the only copy that has all my latest revisions, but I’d love for you to borrow it and tell me what you think. I could send you postage so you could mail it back.”

  The literary critic Edmund Wilson, near the end of his life, had a supply of preprinted postcards stating that “Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him” to read manuscripts, judge literary contests, make after-dinner speeches, supply photographs of himself, and so on. Florence needed a postcard like that.

  “I think it would be really interesting for you to read,” Dolly said. “I feel like it would be a treat. No offense, but I feel like you’re one of my ancestors.”

  “Excuse me?” Florence said.

  “I know this is silly, but sometimes I have this fantasy. It’s silly, but I can tell you, because I feel close to you. I’ve read so much of your work that I feel close to you. I fantasize that someday people will write biographies about me, and that they’ll talk about you in those biographies, and they’ll talk about how important you were to my development.

  “In my fantasy—I know it’s just a fantasy—but in my fantasy, that’s the reason you’ll stay alive in people’s minds. Maybe your own work will be forgotten for a while, but when people find out how much you meant to me—you know, when they read my biography—they’ll start reading your books again too.”

  They were moving through the silent, empty streets of Hartford. It was nine o’clock, but everything was darkened and locked. Florence longed to get back to the city, where you could go out at two in the morning for a bowl of hot-and-sour soup. Not that she ever did, but how comforting to know that you could.

  “I know it’s kind of a crazy fantasy,” Dolly said. “But it’s a way of imagining giving something back to you. That’s what I’m saying. I like to imagine giving something back to you, because you’ve given me so much.”

  “Is that what it is?” Florence said. “It sounds like a fantasy of destroying me.”

  “No. No! It’s not that at all. I mean I can see what you mean, but . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “It’s all right. I’m not offended. I’m not offended because it has nothing to do with me. Whatever we may think of Freud, it seems pretty clear that what you’re fantasizing about is destroying your mother’s power over you and bringing her back as a dependent. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Dolly was silent for half a block.

  “No one has ever talked to me like this. That was so rude. No one has ever talked to me like this before.”

  “Do you know why that is? It’s because no one has ever taken you seriously before. Most people probably tune you out, because you say such foolish things. I’m taking a chance here on the possibility that you’re not as foolish as you seem. But when you invite someone for a reading and then tell her that you have this fantasy that someday everything she’s done is going to be forgotten—well, Dolly, if you expect anyone to be pleased by that, you’re out of your mind. All I can really tell you is that you might have more in you than this. Maybe not. Maybe you’re just as crazy and thoughtless and oblivious to other people as you seem to be. But maybe you’re putting on this ditzy, poor-little-me act because you’re afraid of who you’ll be if you really let your aggression flow. That would be my advice to you, if I were a shrink. Let your damned aggression out. The way you’re acting now, you’re trying to be this little Yiddishe Pollyanna, but your hatred of that role is leaking out of every pore. So let your real aggression out and see what happens. Things might get interesting if you do. And while you’re at it, you might find a real name. Dolly? Really? Is that the name you were born with?”

  “I was born Dora. Everybody’s
always called me Dolly.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, use Dora, or find another name that befits a grown woman. Dolly might have fit when you were five, but isn’t it time to get a name that isn’t so confining?”

  They were at a traffic light. It turned green, but Dolly didn’t take her foot off the brake. She just sat there, gripping the wheel, looking stunned. Stunned, but, it turned out, not offended.

  “I really, really, really want to thank you. I think you’re right. No one’s ever talked to me like that before. No one’s ever taken me this seriously before. It just goes to show what makes you you.”

  Now there was a car behind them, and the driver leaned hard on the horn, and Dolly quickly put her foot on the gas, lurching through the intersection just after the light had turned red again.

  “It’s just so great that you’re willing to talk like this to me,” Dolly said. “I feel so honored that you’ve taken an interest in me.”

  “I haven’t taken an interest in you. You said some things and I told you what I thought. I probably won’t ever think about you again after you drop me off.”

  “You’re brutal,” Dolly said. “But I appreciate it.”

  They were in the half-circle driveway in front of the hotel.

  “I can’t tell you how much this has meant to me,” Dolly said.

  The simpering nature of her thanks was exhausting, but on the other hand, there was something touching about how bulletproof she was.

  “Thank you,” Florence said. “You’ve got a lot going for you. Don’t sell yourself short.”

  She pulled on the door handle but nothing happened. She looked for the little knob on the windowsill that would unlock the door, but there was no little knob there. Little knobs on car windowsills had disappeared at some point, when Florence hadn’t noticed.

  “I really can’t . . . I really can’t express how great this conversation was,” Dolly said. “I’m going to blog about it.”

  “Great.”

  “I really am. I’m not just going to tweet about it. I’m really going to go into it in depth.”

  “That’s great. Could you . . . ?”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. Sure.”

  She said this, but she didn’t release the door lock. She just sat there basking in Florence’s nearness.

  “I just want to hug you,” Dolly said. “Is that all right?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she closed her eyes, and her face came forward, looking curiously disembodied in the darkness.

  “That’ll do,” Florence said, and she twisted in her seat, trying to find the elusive button that controlled the lock. As Dolly’s head floated toward her, Florence finally found the thing, unforgivably concealed beneath the armrest. She pushed the button, pulled the door handle, and jerked away from Dolly’s attempted embrace.

  “Okay,” Florence said. “That’ll be all. Thank you for the invitation. And if your biographers do rescue me from oblivion someday, I thank you for that too.”

  “Oh—I—” Dolly said.

  “Good luck,” Florence said. “Take care.”

  She was trying to move as quickly as she could, but somewhere between the car and the curb she lost her footing, and she landed on the sidewalk in a tangle much more complicated than she could have achieved if she’d been trying.

  The pain was intense.

  Dolly had sprung out of the car.

  “Oh, my God, Florence. Wow. You have to take more care. That looks bad. Ouch.”

  She put out her hand but Florence ignored it. The pain was too intense for her to try to stand.

  “Do you want me to take you to the emergency room?” Dolly said.

  “Thank you, Dolly, but I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine. Look at you. I think you might have broken your leg.”

  “I just twisted my ankle. I’m fine. I assure you. I’ve had experiences much more painful than this. Childbirth, for example.”

  “Your children came out of your ankle?” Dolly said, a joke that made her strut back and forth for a moment.

  “I’m fine,” Florence said, lifting herself up, again declining Dolly’s hand. “It’s nothing.”

  The truth was that it wasn’t nothing. The lobby was only about thirty feet away, but it felt much farther. Dolly accompanied her, perpetually asking her if she was all right, while Florence tried not to show how devilishly bad her ankle felt.

  It might actually make sense, Florence thought, to get medical attention, but she had to get out of the clutches of her admirer. When she reached the elevators, she shook Dolly’s hand—keeping her arm out stiffly—and said goodbye.

  She’d been looking forward to the train ride back to New York as an opportunity to luxuriate in a book without distraction, but instead she spent those three hours in a sort of symphony of pain.

  When she got back to the city, instead of going home, she went to a hospital, where they X-rayed her, wrapped her sprained ankle, and told her about a nearby place where she could buy a cane.

  35

  Daniel and Janine were walking up Broadway.

  “You really know how to walk in the city,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve mastered that art.”

  It was an art, and he’d been away from New York for so long that he’d forgotten how to practice it. When he wasn’t getting in people’s way, they were getting in his. During his time here so far, he’d managed to train himself out of stunned-tourist mode, where you stop to gawk at some startling urban apparition and people jostle you from behind, but he hadn’t mastered the sudden webstop, where the person in front of you pauses without notice to check something on his iPhone.

  “Do you think Emily’s happy?” Janine said.

  “She seems good to me.”

  “I keep thinking she should get out more. It would be nice if she met a nice boy.”

  “It’s got to be hard to get over Broccoli Boy,” Daniel said.

  “Don’t be mean,” Janine said, but she was smiling.

  Broccoli Boy was Emily’s high school boyfriend, who’d been very nice, but droopy, and somehow moist. They’d given him the name after he came over for dinner one night—he had strong views about broccoli—but they’d never called him that in front of Emily.

  Janine was going to the lab, and he was meeting an old . . . it was hard to know what to call her, really.

  Caroline was standing in front of Columbia University’s entrance gate at Broadway and 116th. She kissed Janine and then she kissed Daniel.

  “Jesus,” Janine said. “You got gorgeous. Isn’t she gorgeous, Daniel?”

  “Yup. She’s gorgeous.”

  Caroline twirled in a circle, happy to display her gorgeousness.

  He’d taken responsibility for her ten or twelve years ago, after her parents were killed in a street-corner mugging. It wasn’t technically in his bailiwick, but he’d made her his concern. She had no other family, and he did his best to see her placed in a decent foster home, breathing down the social workers’ necks to make sure she didn’t get lost in the bureaucracy, and then he checked in on her from time to time, encouraging her to go to community college, to look into scholarships at four-year colleges after she did well there, and finally to go to New York, where she’d always dreamed of living.

  “You’re gorgeous too,” she said to Janine. “Not you, old-timer. You’re in decline.”

  Caroline had become a woman. Tall, glowing with health, with wild blond hair and eyes that were gray and green and yellow and somehow both friendly and ferocious.

  “Make him take you someplace nice,” Janine said. “Don’t let him take you to Dunkin’ Donuts.” She turned and headed downtown.

  Caroline took Daniel’s arm.

  “I do look pretty, don’t I?” she said.

  He took her to lunch and she told him the story of her life since he’d seen her last. She’d been trying out for parts. She was going to sneak up on Hollywood by way of Broadway—that seemed to be the plan. In th
e meantime she was doing commercials to pay the rent. She’d been in three so far: Stouffer’s single-serve microwave dinners, Bose headphones, and Glade air freshener.

  “You didn’t see that one? I was taking a shower in an elevator.”

  “I’ve never seen anybody do that.”

  “You should see me do that.”

  “I’ll look out for it,” he said. “And what do you do when you get home? Do you cook?”

  Daniel believed that people who cooked for themselves were stable. If she cooked, he could feel assured that she was taking care of herself nicely.

  “Why would I cook?” she said. “I have a phone.”

  He asked her where she was living, who she was living with, what her friends were like, what she did in her free time.

  “Do you carry all this in your head?” she said. “It’s like you have a checklist.”

  But he could tell that she was happy he was asking all these questions and happy to be able to give him reassuring answers.

  She told him about some of her auditions. So-and-so had thought she was great but not quite right for the part; so-and-so couldn’t offer her anything right now, but she was sure he fell a little bit in love with her during the audition. Daniel found all of it interesting, but sometimes he wished people wouldn’t go into so much detail.

  “I really think I could be a star if I get a chance. I think I have greatness in me.”

  He looked at her to see if she was joking, but it didn’t appear that she was.

  “What does that mean?”

  “What does what mean?”

  “To be a star. What does it mean?”

  “What are you, a Martian? You know what it means.”

  “What does it mean to you.”

  “Do you ever watch In Treatment? You’d make a really good shrink.”

  “That’s Janine. So what does it mean?”

  “It means you can choose your parts. You can have your pick. It means you don’t have to worry about money. It means that you get to wear pretty dresses and go to premieres and walk down the red carpet. It’s the closest you can come in this life to growing up and becoming a princess. That’s what it means.”