Flora (22 page)

When I woke up from my nap and went looking for Nonie, I found her sitting on the sofa with the closed coloring book on her lap. She looked guilty when she saw me.

“What did you do while I was asleep?” I demanded.

“Well, I colored another picture,” she said, an odd blush rising in her cheeks. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“Which one? Let me see.”

She turned to the one of Pandora opening the chest full of bad things, the entire picture colored in with her choice of colors. “Is that all right?” she asked rather sheepishly.

“That’s the one I was saving—to do BY MYSELF!”

“Then I have overstepped.”

I looked with disgust at the pink-cheeked figure in her blue gown. Pandora’s dress was supposed to be blackish purple, her face chalk white with dark shadows from what she realizes she has set loose on the world. And the sinister faces and writhing bodies of the plagues and sorrows floating out of the open chest that I had been planning to do one by one in devilish, jarring colors, Nonie had crayoned over so they all looked submerged in a watery green effluvium.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Nonie said. “But you’ve still got Aladdin, which has a similar story.”

“I wanted Pandora,” I said.

WHEN I WOKE
up from my nap in Finn’s future room, I immediately had the feeling that something had not happened, but I did not begin to imagine all that had happened without me.

The light in the sky was too late for it to have been just an hour. I had drooled on the bedspread. It was very quiet outside.
He didn’t come
was my dismal thought. Then I heard a man’s voice in the living room below. Then a clink of a teacup in a saucer and Flora’s eager-to-be-impressed response, then the man again. His voice was deep and harsh, at the other end of the scale from Finn’s spun-glass tenor, and he spoke in blunt clumps, like someone who liked making his points more than he liked making friends.

I got up and checked my woozy self in the cheval glass, but that part of the room was in shadow, so I went across the hall to the mirror in the big bathroom. I looked for signs that Finn might have washed up in here, but the fresh hand towels were folded just as Mrs. Jones had hung them.

As I crept down the stairs it occurred to me that the man was probably Mr. Crump, returned for more of Flora’s corn bread—and probably with another unwelcome offer to buy Nonie’s car. But it was a much older man than Mr. Crump on the sofa beside Flora, having tea from a pot and pound cake.

“There you are!” cried Flora.

“Where is Finn?”

“Oh, honey, he had to go. He had his dinner engagement with Miss Adelaide.”

“He
promised
to come upstairs before he left.”

“He did, but you were sound asleep in your new office. He said he couldn’t bear to wake you.”

“It’s a study, not an office.” (It’s not going to be a study, either, but you won’t know that.)

“Sorry, honey, study.”

Holding his teacup and saucer aloft in front of his chest, the old man impertinently danced his beetle-black eyes on my distress.

“Helen, do you know who this is?” Flora asked.

“I’m … not sure.” He was an old man in a Sunday shirt and a stand-up tuft of wispy white hair and those rude little beetle-black eyes. I might have met him before, but I couldn’t think where.

“This is your grandmother’s half brother, Mr. Earl Quarles,” she announced as though she were presenting royalty.

It was the Old Mongrel himself, sitting on our sofa inside our house.

“Stepbrother, not half brother,” I corrected.

“The young lady’s right,” the Old Mongrel spoke up. “Honora and I were no relation. But I thought the world of her.”

I lingered resentfully against the archway separating the living room from the hallway. How had this happened? My father would be beside himself with disgust. If people did such a thing as turn over in their graves, Nonie would be doing that right now.

“How about a slice of pound cake, Helen?”

“I’m really not hungry.”

“Well, come in and keep Mr. Quarles company while I get more hot water.”

“Not for me,” said the Old Mongrel. “I reckon I ought to be getting along home.” But Flora was off to the kitchen with the teapot and he made no move to leave.

I walked sedately across to Nonie’s wing chair and sat facing him.

“I haven’t had a cup of pot-brewed tea since my wife died,”
he said, with the return of the singsongy whine I recalled from the funeral home. “Now they just serve you up a bag with lukewarm water on the side and call that tea.”

Unwilling to make small talk about tea bags, I sat erect on the edge of the chair and stared at him.

He put down his cup and saucer. “You favor her,” he said.

“Who?” I was not going to help him.

“Honora. Your grandmother. You must miss her a heap.”

I certainly wasn’t going to respond to
that
, even if he started to think I was a cretin.

“She wasn’t much older than you when we met. Oh, me, it was a bad day for her.” He uttered a wheezy, almost soundless laugh. “Hated me on sight. Well, I don’t blame her. But after a while we made friends. She ever talk about me?”

I could barely shake my head. My lips felt pasted against my teeth.

“I was nine years older. So there was a period there when she was still a child and I was already a man, but then that changed and we were more like equals. But she was always smarter than me. I knew that right from the start. Smart and high-tempered.” Another wheezy chuckle. “Oh, me.”

Oh,
God
, Flora, where are you?

“What grade are you in school?” Even a slow-witted child could answer that.

“I’ll be going into sixth.”

“Your daddy’s the principal, isn’t he?”

“He’s principal of the
high school
.”

“That’s what I thought. I was looking at some acreage that’s about to go on sale at the top of your hill this afternoon and thought I’d drop by and pay my respects to him. But your
cousin says he’s over in Oak Ridge doing some important war work. How old is your father now?”

Never
ask a person’s age, I had been taught practically from infancy. “My father is the age of the century,” I said, which would show that I knew his age without actually saying it.

“Oh no, he couldn’t be.”

This was too much. “I guess I ought to know my own father’s age,” I said as coldly as I could.

“With all due respect, young lady, you must have got your figures wrong.”

“My grandfather wrote a poem on the day my father was born. ‘Midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this December morn / a boy is born.’ It’s in a book upstairs in my grandfather’s consulting room. The date at the bottom of the poem says December the eighth, nineteen hundred. That’s my father’s birthday.”

This silenced the Old Mongrel. He looked gratifyingly flummoxed. And my small victory was that I still hadn’t said my father’s age.

Flora came back with the pot just as he was heaving himself up from the sofa. “Oh no, Mr. Quarles, you’re not leaving?”

“I better be getting on home, Miss Flora. My cataracts don’t operate so well when the dusk sets in.”

“I hope you and Helen got a
little
acquainted.”

“Oh, I would say we did.” Standing up, he was taller than I expected. “She takes after Honora all right.” Again the almost soundless, wheezy chuckle. “Well, you all have been very kind to me and I thank you for your hospitality. At least I got to meet the young lady and your nice friend, and I’m glad I could help with the Oldsmobile.”

Looking down at me he explained, “We jumped Honora’s batteries with my cables and gave Miss Flora her first driving lesson while you was having your nap. She needs to mash on the brake less, but she’s going to do real well. She’ll tell you all about it.”

Flora and I stood outside the kitchen door and watched the Old Mongrel’s big, sloping car with whitewalls cautiously bump down our driveway.

“That is the last Packard Clipper model they made before we entered the war,” said Flora dreamily.

“How do you know that?”

“Finn told me. He worked on cars like that before he joined the Army. He says Mr. Quarles must have money.”

“Of course he has. He got all the inheritance that was supposed to go to my grandmother. What I don’t understand is how he got inside our house.”

“Well, I invited him, Helen.”

“If I had been awake, that would never have been allowed to happen.”

“But he and your grandmother grew up together, honey.”

“Oh, grew up together,” I said bitterly. “People are always growing up together, according to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was nine years older than Nonie and my mother was twelve years older than you. You can’t ‘grow up together’ when there’s that much difference in your ages.”

“What on earth has gotten into you, Helen?” At last she had picked up on the fact that I was shaking with rage.

“My father would
never
have let him in the house.”

Now she blanched. “Why not?”

“
Because
. He’s an old mongrel. That’s what my father calls him: the Old Mongrel.”

“What has he done to deserve that?”

“He’s a crook. He tried to bribe the funeral director to make him open Nonie’s casket.”

“Well, that’s not exactly a crook, honey. He probably wanted to see her one last time. You heard him say how much he thought of her.”

“He’s ill-bred. He asks people’s ages. He says ‘while you was having your nap.’ “

“Everyone doesn’t speak the King’s English, Helen. Mrs. Jones slips up on her grammar and you are very fond of her.”

“You leave her out of it. She stays in control of her days and Nonie admired her. And he’s a sneak and a bully and thinks nothing of taking what isn’t his.”

“Goodness, where did you get all that? I’ve never heard you even mention him before.”

“I got it from Nonie and my father. I never mentioned him because the last thing I expected was to take a nap and wake up and find you’d polluted our house.” I was starting to cry for the first time in front of Flora, and this made me all the more angry with her.

“Now, listen, Helen, that’s enough. I think you ought to go off by yourself and cool down before supper. We’re having spaghetti. I used up the last of Juliet’s herbs for the sauce.”

“I don’t want her fucking sauce and I’m sick of eating! I’m sick of you! I can’t wait till you leave!”

XXIV.

I remember feeling, after my blowup that Sunday, that I could still give myself credit for some adult restraint. I hadn’t actually cried. I hadn’t hit. In the past, even the recent past, I had sometimes hit Nonie in aggravation, but during this summer I had never once hit Flora. Okay, I had lashed out verbally in a childish way—and gotten a child’s satisfaction from the instant response—but I knew I could still reap some longer-term benefits if I apologized. I wasn’t really sorry about using my father’s worst swearword. It was a thing men said, but if a female used it sparingly it had great shock value. I had shocked Flora. Then I had hurt her by saying I was sick of her and would be glad when she was gone. But though Flora was easy to hurt, she was also an easy forgiver. When I went off to cool down, as instructed by her, I used that time by myself to compose my scene of contrition.

I knew even while screaming at Flora that I was going to have to apologize later, because my goal was to get along with her
on the surface
for the rest of the summer while keeping my serious schemes to myself. First, though, I checked myself over for wounds and then laid out the pluses and minuses of the afternoon.
I had first done this after Flora’s one outburst—if you could call it that—when I had been snotty about refusing to send my picture to the Alabama people, and she had lost control and “told me things” about my mother’s selfishness and cruelty. What I had lost that other day was my illusion that Flora adored my mother unreservedly, but what I had gained was valuable information as to what Lisbeth had really been like and the realization that I wouldn’t be sorry to behave with her cold expediency under similar circumstances. It felt gratifying being allied with my mother in this way.

Today’s losses and gains weren’t as simply tallied. Finn hadn’t come up to say good-bye; or, rather, he had come and couldn’t bear to wake me. The Old Mongrel had been in our house, and I would have to tell my father; but the downspout had been reattached and the gutters cleaned, which would please my father and make him like Finn. Nonie’s batteries had been charged; but Flora had been given her first driving lesson as a result. The Old Mongrel had referred to Finn as “your nice friend” when he was thanking Flora: had his ‘your’ meant Flora and me, or had he thought Finn was Flora’s boyfriend?

The best way to apologize, according to Nonie, was to come right out and say you were sorry and get it over with. You didn’t have to belabor it, but you did have to convince the other person you were sincere.

As we were spreading our napkins in our laps—Flora used old prewar paper ones from the pantry when we had spaghetti—I stayed focused on my lap and murmured, “I apologize for what I said. I didn’t mean it, I was just mad.”

“Oh, Helen. And I’m sorry, too. I had no idea how you felt about Mr. Quarles. And I know you didn’t mean … all you said to me.”

She went on some more, overdoing her forgiveness and her gratitude for my apology, and how she had no idea, et cetera, until I felt it was time to get her off that subject.

We twirled our spaghetti. I thought of saying something nice about Juliet Parker’s herbs in the sauce, but couldn’t trust it to come out sounding a hundred percent sincere. “You know what I really want to know?” I asked.

“What, honey?”

“How did it feel to drive?”

“I can hardly claim I
drove
, honey, with Finn right next to me, ready to grab the wheel if I messed up and Mr. Quarles shouting his advice into my open window.”

“But where did you go?”

“What do you mean where did I go?”

“Did you go down our driveway and onto the road?”