Flora (2 page)

“This one suits me, doesn’t it, Helen?”

“Oh, it really does.”

Whereupon she would have addressed the handsome hat. And then: a sudden widening of the eyes, a hand slapped to her chest: “Quick, darling, go in my purse and fetch me …” She trusted my nimble fingers to do the rest: root in the bag, twist open the familiar vial, hand over the doll’s-size pill.

(“And if I should have already fainted, Helen, you know what to do.” “Open your mouth and slip it under your tongue.” “That’s right, darling, like a baby bird feeding the mama bird.”)

We had rehearsed it.

Later, when I had attained an age she never reached, there was a television commercial that never failed to choke me up. A man and his son are walking in the country when suddenly the father clutches his chest, the landscape turns a sickly sepia, and the father falls. But the son whips out a Bayer aspirin, the father rises to his feet, embraces the son, and Technicolor is restored to their lives.

“Don’t worry, I have every intention of sticking around till I’ve finished raising you,” Nonie always assured me after one of her episodes, and I could hear her saying it again that day—the day we never had. If only she had waited till my school was out so I could have been there to whip out the little vial in Blum’s and save the day.

The day after Nonie’s funeral, my father and I drove Flora to the train station. She had to return to her teachers’ college and finish the semester. “For the rest of my life, whenever I see or hear a locomotive, I’ll miss Daddy,” she said, starting to weep as the Birmingham train pulled in. My father rolled his eyes and handed over his handkerchief. “Keep it,” he said. “We’ll see you in June.”

“Why did you say that about June?” I demanded as soon as we were alone.

“I’ve asked Flora to stay with you this summer while I’m at Oak Ridge. I can’t pay her a whole lot, but she’ll be saving on her expenses, and she wants to do it.”

I was stung. All the more so because this had been decided between them behind my back. “You mean, like a babysitter?”

“Ten is not old enough to stay alone, Helen.”

“I’ll be eleven in August.”

“Even if you were going to be sixteen in August, that still wouldn’t be old enough. I thought you and Flora got on.”

We were driving across the bridge that arched above the railroad yards. The “put-upon” voice that my father always employed with Nonie when she was backing him into a corner was now being directed at me. Did Flora and I get on? It was more like Flora praised and deferred to me and I tolerated her because she was my mother’s first cousin and showed up at family funerals. Until now, I had assumed both my father and I considered her somewhat awkward and childlike. Yet here he was putting her in charge for the summer.

“This is such a strange time for me,” he said in the same keep-clear-of-me voice he’d used when he picked me up at school on the day of Nonie’s death. “Mother is gone,” he had said. “Just like that, in Blum’s. Don’t ask me what we’re going to do next because I don’t know.”

EASTER THAT YEAR
fell on April first, only a few days after Nonie’s funeral. I felt self-conscious in church. I had gone everywhere with Nonie, and I could hear people silently wondering how I was ever going to manage without her. Those who
hadn’t known us well enough to come to the house for the funeral reception gathered round after church to offer condolences. My father and I were worn out by the time we got home. He made us grilled pimento cheese sandwiches in the skillet, letting them get too dark, and washed his down with Jack Daniel’s in an iced tea glass. Then we sat side by side at the dining room table and answered more sympathy letters. He wrote the messages and I addressed the envelopes and licked the flaps and put on the stamps. When I pointed out that the recipients would notice our different handwritings, he said, “Fine. They’ll be all the more charmed and touched.” His voice had edged over into sarcasm by then.

Then came a letter that made him swear.

“Who’s it from?”

“That old mongrel we saw crying at the funeral home.”

“What does
he
want?” I knew my father was referring to the old man who had shown up at Swann’s funeral home demanding to “see” Honora and had broken down and cried when we told him she had stipulated that her casket remain closed. It was Nonie’s hated stepbrother, brought to her father’s farm by the housekeeper who would become her father’s second wife. His name was Earl Quarles and he had inherited all the property that should have gone to Nonie.

“He says he wants to keep in touch,” my father sneered. “Get to know us better before he meets his Maker. Swann told me he came back to the funeral home after we left and tried to bribe him to open the casket.”

“Fat chance,” I said.

“Most people have their price,” said my father.

“But if Mr. Swann had taken the bribe he wouldn’t have told you about it, would he?”

“I probably shouldn’t say this, Helen, but I look forward to the day when you can spot the unsavory truths about human nature for yourself.” He crumpled the letter in his fist and to my disappointment shoved the whole wad, envelope included, into his jacket pocket. No chance now of my fishing it out of the wastebasket. Without bothering to put in fresh ice, he sloshed more Jack Daniel’s into his iced tea glass and lurched upstairs.

I wandered into Nonie’s room, which was on the ground floor, next to mine, and climbed up on her bed. I turned down the spread and buried my face in her pillows. Her smell was markedly fainter than yesterday. The insidious Sunday afternoon light pushed at me through the drawn curtains. Nonie, who could bend time to her purposes, was no longer here to protect me from emptiness. Even when she had closed her door to lie on her three pillows and take her appointed afternoon rest, the connection between us had been maintained. It always felt like she was in there refueling for us all.

Desperate to burrow back to that connection, I ground my face and body into her bedclothes. This time last Sunday she would have been lying here. The sheets had not yet been changed. She had died on Monday, and Mrs. Jones, whose day was Tuesday, had been postponed for a week. Nonie’s black satchel purse presided aloofly from the top of the dresser. Inside was the little vial of nitroglycerin, useless now. “Handsome” languished, unseen on Easter Day, in its hatbox on her closet shelf.

How could she be so here and not here? I tried to make myself cry into her pillows before the smell of her cold cream vanished altogether. If she was gone, what parts of me had she taken with her? The parts she talked to, taught things to, told her stories to, would never again be addressed by her. And yet her way of saying things was all around me, they were inside of me.

All around me was our house, which pulsed with her stories of it. Old One Thousand she called it, because that was its number; it was the last house at the top of Sunset Drive. She and my grandfather and their young son had shared its rooms and porches with the Recoverers, back in the days when it catered to a few well-paying convalescent tuberculars or inebriates, and occasional souls whose nerves weren’t yet up to going back to ordinary life.

If Nonie were still here, lying on her raised pillows on this Sunday afternoon, I would likely be upstairs on the Recoverers’ south porch, reading or daydreaming on the faded horsehair cushions of a chaise longue. Back when Old One Thousand had also been Dr. Anstruther’s Lodge, there was a view of the town below and the ranges of mountains encircling it, but now the view was blocked by a hectic tangle of branches just beginning to leaf out. The Recoverers would sit on this porch playing cards and sharing the news of their latest clean X-rays or sobriety day-counts or sessions with the local psychiatrist until the sun had moved over the roof; then they would gather their things and move over to the west porch. They were all just figments now, the real people departed long before I was born, but Nonie had told me about them and also about the grandfather I hadn’t known, Doctor Cam, a man thirty years older than herself. How she as an eighteen-year-old girl had been walking to town carrying her valise, running away from the farm and her greedy new stepmother and menacing stepbrother, when this man had reined in his horse and called down in a low-country accent from his cabriolet: “Young lady, can I carry you somewhere?”

“It was a turn of phrase South Carolinians used, but I’d never heard it before. A cabriolet? It was a small, two-wheeled buggy with a retractable hood. The hood was down, so I could
get a good look at him before I decided whether to get in. He more than passed inspection—he had a neat gray mustache and nice clothes and was old enough to be my father, if I had been lucky enough to have such an elegant one—so I climbed aboard. While we were settling my valise in the little space in front of my feet, he asked where I was wanting to go and I said, ‘Today I’m only traveling as far as the Battery Hill Hotel, so anywhere you let me off in town will be fine.’ I had prepared this answer in case I was offered a ride. The Battery Hill was the best hotel, and I was hoping to get work there as a maid or laundress, but I wanted to convey the impression I was staying there as a guest waiting for a train the next morning. He said it would be no trouble to take me to the hotel, and then started right in giving information about himself, the way thoughtful people do when they want to put you at your ease. He was a physician and a widower from Columbia, South Carolina. His wife had died of TB in a sanitorium here, and he had fallen in love with the pure air of the mountains and decided to stay on and establish a home for convalescents who were out of danger but still needed rest and care. This morning he had gone to an estate auction in the country and had been lucky enough to acquire some useful items, including a twelve-gallon ice cream freezer, which he was having delivered. It was the same estate sale my father and stepmother and odious stepbrother had gone off to that morning, which had given me my opportunity to escape. I remember sitting in that cabriolet taking me further and further away from the farm and recalling Elise telling my father that very morning she was going to come home with that ice cream freezer if it was the last thing she did. It made me smile, and the doctor noticed it and looked at me so kindly that I almost told him the truth right then. But I thought better of it. It’s best to keep
yourself to yourself—especially when you are running away. So I just smiled and kept silent. Oh, I can still see that horse’s sleek rump rotating in the sunshine, and I can smell the leather from the reins in the doctor’s hands and the masculine scent of the toiletry he wore. It was a beautiful May morning and everything was starting to bloom. Before he let me off at the Battery Hill Hotel he gave me his card and said he sincerely hoped I’d get in touch if he could be of further assistance. The card had his Columbia address scored through and he’d written below in a fine copperplate hand: Anstruther’s Lodge, Cameron Anstruther, M.D., Director, and the local address.

“That was the first Anstruther’s Lodge; it was right in town. We bought this house on Sunset Mountain when Harry was going on ten and people had cars. I’ll take you past the old lodge if you like, but do keep in mind it was in a better part of town in those days and looked a lot nicer than it does now.

“I got a job as a laundress at the hotel until they found out I could cook and promoted me to the kitchen. But then my father tracked me down and sent my stepbrother, Earl Quarles, to bring me home. Earl made a scene at the hotel. But I had things to hold over him, and I told him if I was forced to go back to the farm I would see that my father was informed of those things and Earl would be out on his ear.

“What things? Oh, darling, Earl had so many bad traits it would be hard to single one out for you. Let’s just say he was sneaky and bullying and thought nothing of taking what wasn’t his. He had his eye on that farm from the beginning. I don’t know what lies he told them when he returned without me, but Father didn’t send him back again.”

“Didn’t you and your father ever make up?”

“No, darling, we never did. Fate was unkind in that regard.
After I had Harry, I was planning to go out and see Father and show him his grandson. And then I opened the paper one morning and saw his obituary. He was only fifty-two but had died of a massive heart attack. The obituary was in the paper from several days back so I couldn’t even go to his funeral. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.

“Earl’s scene at the hotel had cost me my job. It was not the kind of hotel where visitors of employees were allowed to threaten and scream. It was then that I remembered the doctor and called on him at his lodge. It was only a few minutes’ walk from the hotel. I started cooking for his convalescents and ran the household for him. Until one day he asked me if he was too old for me to love, and I gave him a good long look and said, ‘No, you are exactly right.’”

NONIE WAS A
born storyteller. It is not so remarkable that I have made a life and a living from storytelling. But there were dangers and drawbacks in her ways of telling and her ways of not telling. Gradually I have come to wonder how deeply her methods have infiltrated mine.

III.

Flora had three interviews for primary school teaching jobs in Alabama and couldn’t come to us until the second week in June, but my father was to report for work on June first. He had his gas coupons and four new tires from the Ration Board for his second summer at Oak Ridge, where he was being promoted to paymaster for a big new complex under construction, and made no secret about his impatience to leave. He’d much rather be outdoors supervising an important project for the war effort, he said, than kowtowing to small-town faculty egos. He had been the principal of Mountain City High since I was born, but loved to grumble that carpentry and construction work was his true calling, which had been thwarted by the social expectations of others.

Also—and he couldn’t stop reminding me of this—Oak Ridge would be a healthful change of pace for him because no alcohol was allowed on the premises.

I was as willing for him to go as he was chafing to be gone. Nonie’s removal had altered things between us. The “put-upon” note in his voice, which Nonie had her ways of quelling, was now directed at me, who only seemed to exacerbate it.