Flora (18 page)

You warm this old heart the way you lavish praise on me, but I am basically just a country girl without much education who has tried to keep her dignity and make the most of the cards dealt her. As I sit at this handsome desk my son restored for me and look around me on this quiet afternoon (and yet the world is at war) in our safe house on top of this mountain, I am astonished that things have turned out for me as
well as they have. And my wish for you, Flora, is that when you reach my age you will be able to say the same—and much more!

Yours truly,

Honora Anstruther

XIX.

Dear Rachel,

You cannot imagine what a horrible

Dear Rachel,

How is the pool?

Dear Rachel,

Little did I know that the week with you would be the best

Dear Rachel,

I certainly hope your summer has been better than mine

How could writing a letter be such torture? I had expected that sitting at my grandmother’s desk and using her writing materials would work some kind of spell and out would flow the words I needed to mend my fences with the Huffs. But so far I had crumpled four sheets of Nonie’s good stationery and I
couldn’t even throw them in the wastebasket because Mrs. Jones would discover them and think less of me. I knew the effect I wanted my letter to have (to soothe Rachel’s hurt pride, to reestablish me in Mrs. Huff’s graces so she wouldn’t stand on street corners saying bad things about me), but after what seemed like hours I was no nearer my goal than these four infantile, though correctly spelled, openings.

Rachel was a horrible speller.

The trouble was … What was the trouble? I didn’t really care about the Huffs all that much, but needed them to like and admire me. Was there something left out of my moral makeup, or did I just require more social lessons in how to act as if I cared? I could see Flora, for instance, scrawling a heartfelt letter that would redeem her with the Huffs. But, then, Flora wouldn’t need to be redeemed because she would have written a thank-you note in the first place. No, wait a minute! Didn’t Flora neglect to write Nonie after spending a whole week in our house after my mother’s funeral? (“we have been worrying and wondering ever since you left. We never heard from you”)

Oh, it was not easy when you had lost the person who had taught you how to act. I took a fifth sheet of stationery from Nonie’s box and tried to hear what she would advise if she were in the room.

Think what it would be like if you
did
care about them, darling, and then write the letter. Be simple and modest and don’t complain. Don’t make excuses for the delay, it only reminds them of the delay. The letter doesn’t have to be long. In fact, it’s better if it’s not long. That way they will be better able to read into it what they need.

Dear Rachel,

I hope you are having a good summer. I had a really nice time at your house. Please tell your mother hello for me and thank her for her hospitality. See you back at school. I really can’t wait.

Your friend,

Helen

Oh, hell. I had used
really
twice. Which would be worse? To waste another sheet of Nonie’s good paper or to have Mrs. Huff think my writing style was childish?

Flora was upstairs, working on her lesson plans for her real class in Alabama. This morning in our fifth grade she had assigned the children to be different parts of speech and get together in small groups and form sentences. It was something our English teacher had done with our class, but I let Flora think it was my idea. She said I was brilliant and then her usual thing about how she hoped she didn’t have anybody as smart as me in her real class or she wouldn’t know what to do. I thought it was all right to take credit for the parts of speech idea since I had run myself ragged being everyone in all the groups, from Suzanne the Noun and Brick the Verb to “Milderd” the Preposition and Jock the Interjection.

Deciding that childishness might work in my favor in this particular letter, I addressed a matching envelope to Miss Rachel Huff, put a three-cent Victory stamp on it, and headed down what Finn called our holy terror of a driveway to be in time for the postman. I pictured Rachel scuffling down her driveway, kicking up as much white gravel as she could, and finding my letter in their box. She would rip it open the brutal way she opened her presents, scan it with a shrug, and take it back to the
house to show her mother. “Well, well, better late than never,” Lorena Huff would say. She would read it over several times, cheered by my childish
really
s. I wasn’t
that
superior to her Rachel, after all. “You know, Rachel, maybe we’ve been too hard on Helen. The poor child can’t be having a good summer. You can tell from all she doesn’t say. You notice she doesn’t mention that excitable cousin, and you can tell she misses our house and the pool.”

It wasn’t lunchtime yet, so I went to sit in Nonie’s car and go on with my story of how it would be when Finn came to live with us. Any branch of the story could lead to satisfying little branchlets. Finn’s driving lessons could turn into the first time he lets me drive to school and how everyone sees me with him in the passenger seat, or it could take us on a trip around town where I point out significant landmarks of my history. (“That house over there was my grandfather’s first lodge for the Recoverers, but you have to keep in mind that this was a better part of town back then and things looked much nicer …”)

“Guess what?” Flora greeted me when I came in for lunch. “Finn called.”

“Did he ask for me?”

“Well, he seemed ready to talk to whoever answered.”

“What did he want?”

“Mr. Crump had told him we were worried about him, and—”

“I wasn’t worried. Maybe
you
were.”

“What happened, honey? You were in such a good mood this morning.”

“What happened was I spent the whole rest of the morning writing a stupid letter.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t stupid. You couldn’t be stupid if you tried. Was it to your father?”

“I’m not writing him again until he writes me. If you must know, it was to the Huffs.”

“It’s none of my business. I didn’t mean to pry.” Then, typical of Flora, she undermined her whole argument by asking was there any special reason I was writing to the Huffs, or was it just to say hello.

“It was a thank-you letter I forgot to write sooner. But I think it’s better to write a thank-you note late than not to ever write it, don’t you?”

“Oh, I definitely do.” I had expected her to blush or bury her face in her hands at the memory of her own rudeness, but my accusation went right over her. “Anyway, Finn said he wanted to fill us in on what’s been happening to him, so I invited him to dinner.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Was that okay?”

“Did he sound good or bad?”

“Good, I think. Maybe he’s heard something from that military board and he can start making plans for his future. I said we were only having Juliet’s wartime meat loaf recipe, which goes heavy on oatmeal for filler, but he sounded eager to come. I’m glad I still have some of Juliet’s dried oregano left. Maybe I’ll make some of her cheese straws for starters.”

I was dying to say “Juliet who?” just to get her goat, but, looking ahead to the happy day when the Willow Fanning room would be empty and Finn would be settling into the Starling Peake room, I said, “I want to watch you make them so I can do it for my father after you’re gone.” She looked so pleased that I generously added, “But we will always call them Flora’s cheese straws.”

XX.

Finn looked more presentable, somehow. Since his last visit, his hair had grown out enough from its spiky crew cut to lie flat on either side of a part, and his beaky face had acquired a becoming layer of color. He wore a neatly ironed khaki shirt and trousers and some brown, military-looking shoes. He had brought us a bunch of fragrant roses in a variety of colors from the garden of the old lady who kept forgetting things, only he now referred to her as Miss Adelaide, and explained he had been watering her garden and feeding her cat while she recuperated in the hospital from a fall.

“Cats prefer to stay in their own home even without their owners,” he said.

“So do humans,” I pointed out, which struck me as a very witty comeback except that Flora sideswiped it by asking if poor Miss Adelaide had broken anything. She very luckily hadn’t, Finn said, though she was bruised all over her body from head to toe. Into my overexcited brain popped the image of a naked old lady showing Finn her bruises from head to toe and out of my mouth burst a childish snort of laughter, which embarrassed all three of us.

“But we want to hear what’s been happening to
you
,” said Flora, taking Finn lightly by the arm and steering him into the living room. “Is there any news from that military board you met with?”

“No final decision yet,” said Finn, settling into his former place on the sofa. “But if a person can guess when he’s made a good impression, I’d say there’s hope.”

“Can you talk about it?” asked Flora breathlessly, sliding in next to him, “or is it a confidential matter?”

“Sure, I can talk about it—with friends,” said Finn. “But to fill you in properly I’d need to go back a little. Ah, I was hoping you’d have that lemonade again.”

“And Helen made the cheese straws.”

“Not totally,” I corrected her. “You were standing right over me.”

“Well, you
shaped
them completely without my help,” insisted Flora, which drew attention to their rather clumsily twisted bodies on the serving plate.

“Let him go on,” I said.

“Well,” Finn began again, “I have to go back a little for it to make sense. Maybe as far back as September of ’forty-three, coming up two years ago, when we docked at Liverpool. There were five thousand of us on this transport ship built to carry one thousand. A bit crowded, but there you are. But it made our Nissen huts in the English countryside where we ended up seem like little palaces at first. My company was training hard, building foxholes, perfecting our skills of loving the ground. Remember, Helen, on our little … er … walk that day”—his eye caught mine to signal our secret was still safe—“and I was telling you how we learned to use the ground to keep ourselves alive?”

“I remember,” I said, looking meaningfully back.

“Then the weather turned cold and wet and many of the men came down with asthma or pneumonia. Pneumonia was your first choice because asthma was considered a chronic thing and they transferred you to a desk job. When I was diagnosed with pneumonia, I danced for joy because I could still be cured in time to make the big jump we’d been practicing for two years.”

I could picture Finn dancing for joy the way I had seen him do it that day in the crater. Flora couldn’t have such a picture because she didn’t know we’d been in the crater together and she never would.

“Then my lung collapsed and this one doctor saw scar tissue on an X-ray which he thought was a sign of tubercles, and I was evacuated so as not to infect others.”

“You had TB?” I asked excitedly.

“Don’t be rushing me, darling.”

“Sorry.” But it was the first time anyone had called me darling since Nonie died, which somewhat lessened the shame of his reproof.

“As it fell out, I didn’t have TB, but they weren’t sure till they got me to the military hospital here. And then there was the long recovery from the collapsed lung, and I missed the big jump on D-Day.”

“Well, I’m glad you missed it!” Flora cried. “So many boys were killed!” She had her arms crossed over her chest and was rubbing them up and down, the way she did during our scary programs.

“Ah,” said Finn, not rebuking
her
for interrupting but giving her an appreciative nod as if she was helping him along. “Which brings us to the second part of my sorry tale, how I joined the ranks of the mentalers. By now I was all clean in the X-rays but I still had to undergo a regimen to build back my lung power.
Every day we … Recoverers (I love that word) were driven out to a mountain near the hospital and had to walk up and down a trail, a bit farther each day, and have our breathing monitored. The big jump had happened without me, but I was expecting to be sent back overseas soon. The D-Day casualties had been heavy and there was plenty of fighting left to do. Then, one day they told me I had a visitor and I went down and there was my mate Barney’s mother. Barney and I had gone through jump school together and he was in the Nissen hut with me in England. While we were training in Georgia, he had taken me home on leave to his mother’s apple orchards, which he was going to run as soon as the war was over. She was a widow and he was the only child. When I came into the reception room, she gave me a strange smile and said I looked a little fatter than when I had visited. She had ridden the bus up from Georgia, she said, to bring me some baked goods and a few keepsakes. She hadn’t said Barney’s name, but as soon as she said “keepsakes” I knew he hadn’t made it. She said she had heard “from overseas” that I had been sent home to this place. I knew it must have been in a letter from Barney in the winter of ’forty-four. Still there was no saying of his name. It was like we were in a contest not to be the unkind one to speak it first. Then she said she’d brought a drawing I’d done in the Nissen hut, it was in the tin, along with a snapshot of me taken at her house. I knew she meant my drawing of Barney because I remembered him sending it to her. When I said she should keep it, she said she’d rather not. Still no saying of his name, and then she switched to asking about me and the state of my health and she was smiling that strange smile again.”