Flora (3 page)

I had not known how wobbly things were at Old One Thousand. I barely knew what a mortgage was. Hitler had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, and the European part of the war had ended in early May, which was supposed to have made everybody happy, except it didn’t. All sorts of qualified young men with talents or important connections would be coming home soon to wrest away jobs from the “old guys” like my father, who was forty-five.

We got on each other’s nerves. One minute he was treating me like a child and then the very next was complaining that something I had said or done was “downright childish.” My worst offense had been at a coffee hour after church. President Roosevelt had died only a few weeks after Nonie, and some people my father didn’t like but who were influential in the community were saying wasn’t it sad that FDR hadn’t lived to see V-E Day. My father stood looking over our heads, encased in his laconic reserve, and I felt that somebody in our family needed to point out that Nonie hadn’t admired FDR all that much.

One evening there was a curse and a thud, and I found my father passed out on the kitchen floor. While I was kneeling over him, wiping the blood from his forehead, I prepared myself to receive fatherly praise for being just where I was needed with the wet cloth. But he cracked open an eye and slurred, “Get the fuck away.”

His June first departure meant I would have to stay with a friend during the week before Flora arrived. I had three friends in fifth grade. My favorite was Annie Rickets, with her wild imagination and her gleeful malice. She speculated outlandishly about what was going on behind the scenes in the lives of people we knew. Both her parents worked for the phone company
and, she darkly hinted, had access to equipment that could breach any secret, local or national. Also she was witty about sex. Nonie had provided me with an overview of how things worked, but Annie contributed specific anecdotes garnered from her frank-talking mother and her own salacious speculations. Her gleeful malice occasionally went too far, like when she said my grandmother looked like an upright mastiff driving a car. I found a picture of a mastiff in a dog book and didn’t speak to her for a week. From then on Nonie was off-limits. But Annie shared a walled-in sleeping porch with her two younger sisters and couldn’t have overnight guests.

Then there was Brian Beale, a late-born child who looked like a young prince in an old-fashioned storybook. His father was dead, and his mother, who cochaired the altar guild with Nonie, was raising Brian to be a classic actor. He was taking elocution lessons from an English lady in town to get rid of his mountain twang. Brian and I were allowed to go to afternoon movies by ourselves, and he liked to drawl in his new-fledged British accent, “When we are older, Helen, I shall probably ask for your hand.” Brian had stayed at our house two years before, when his mother had an operation, and when I told him about Flora not being able to come till the second week in June, he said, “You’ll stay with us, of course.” I thanked him and imagined myself already there, though Mrs. Beale was an awful worrier and wouldn’t let us do much. But then Lorena Huff phoned and said she and Rachel were counting on my staying with them. My father left it up to me, and guiltily I chose the Huffs. I lied to Brian that my father thought it was more proper for me to stay with a girl. Rachel Huff, who had moved to town with her mother at the beginning of the war, was less fun than either Annie or Brian. Also she asked rude personal questions
and was usually in a grumpy mood from being forced by her mother to excel in so many things. But they had a huge house and a good cook and a pool, and Rachel had twin beds with canopies and her own bathroom and a maid who picked up your discarded clothes. Mr. Huff was up in Washington doing something so important for the war that he could never come home. But he was always sending contraband items like steaks and Hershey’s bars, and Mrs. Huff admired me. She said I was a good influence on Rachel. She was also partial to my father. Nonie had enjoyed teasing him about this.

When he dropped me off for my week’s stay with them, there was Mrs. Huff’s usual cagey flirtation to get through while they had their drinks.

“Tell me, Harry, what are they really making over there in Oak Ridge? One of Huffie’s sources says it’s a new kind of fuel, so the planes can go on longer raids to bomb the Japs.”

“That’s as good an educated guess as any, Lorena, but I can only tell you what I’ll be doing. Overseeing the construction of a new complex and making sure the men on my crew show up for work. I wish I could do that sort of thing all year round. I’m not cut out to be a school administrator.”

“You’d be good at any kind of work you chose, Harry, but I’m a little hurt with you. Helen could have perfectly well stayed with Rachel and me the whole summer. We have everything here. You had no need to import some fancy governess from out of town.”

“Flora is my wife’s first cousin. She’s training to be a teacher, but she’s hardly a fancy governess. I thought it would be better for Helen to stay in her own home. She’s had enough upheaval as it is.”

“Wasn’t she that emotional girl reading your mother’s letters
to everyone after the funeral? Well, you know best, but if for some reason it doesn’t work out with Flora, my offer stands.”

“That’s very generous of you, Lorena, but I see no reason why things shouldn’t work out.”

The week with the Huffs turned out to be a torment. Everyone had a schedule but me. Rachel and her mother were on the tennis court before breakfast. I lay in bed hearing their back-and-forth
thwock
s, interspersed with Lorena Huff’s criticisms and Rachel’s sullen groans. Then the cook started her breakfast sounds, and here came the gardener’s truck rattling up the drive, and after that began the various parcel deliveries, which seemed to go on all day. Ladies arrived to see Lorena Huff, and they sat on the screened porch and tinkled ice and planned charitable events. Twice a week a man came to the house to teach Rachel piano (she was on John Thompson’s book two), and every afternoon at three a mannish woman in jodhpurs drove Rachel away in a jeep for her riding lesson.

“I want you to treat our house like a resort,” Lorena Huff said. “Swim in the pool, have little talks with Rachel, and show up for meals. We’ll take care of the rest. I want you to consider Rachel and me as your family until that cousin of your mother’s gets here.”

Wasn’t it a contradiction in terms for a family member to treat her home as a resort? But what made me far unhappier than my lack of any schedule was the sense that life at Old One Thousand was going on without me.
It
had a schedule and needed someone there to register it. I did my best to patrol its rooms and porches in spirit. Nonie seemed always to be there waiting, just around a corner or on the other side of a door. Sometimes the Recoverers were there, the ones from her stories, discussing their rates of improvement as the sun passed over the house.
Around three o’clock this time of year, as Rachel was being driven away for her riding lesson, they would be gathering up their books and cards and migrating from the south porch to the west porch. And in the background, doing whatever he did in his consulting room (sometimes he wrote poetry: “… ’midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this December morn / a boy is born,” he had begun his ode on the occasion of my father’s birth), presided the watchful spirit of my grandfather Doctor Cam.

Rachel and I swam and had I-bet-you-can’t-do-this contests in the pool while her mother lay in the sun in her two-piece bathing suit, her skinny brown midriff baking to a crisp, her face concealed by a picture hat, leafing through magazines and turning down pages when she saw something she wanted. Rachel and I had a thermos of cold lemonade, and Rachel’s mother had her own thermos, which Rachel said was “spiked,” and eventually Lorena Huff would rise from her deck chair, wiggle her fingers at us coyly, and sway unsteadily toward the house.

Every morning, Rachel and I crunched down the sparkling white drive to the mailbox, Rachel toeing up as much gravel as she could, and by the time we had walked back with the mail, Rachel would have gotten in at least two of her embarrassing questions. These ran the gamut from “Which is worse, having your mother or your grandmother die?” to “Don’t you want to know who your father will marry to look after you?”

I grew more desolate as the week went on. I felt I was neglecting an important duty and losing more of my identity every hour I stayed apart from the rhythms of Old One Thousand. There were times when I was sure that, if I could be there at
that very moment, Nonie would find a way to speak to me, and maybe even to appear, which made me all the more desolate.

Flora was to arrive on a midmorning Saturday train from Birmingham, after a long layover in Columbia, and Mrs. Huff kept warning me that the poor girl would probably be exhausted after sitting up all night and would need to rest before beginning her duties. “Your mother’s cousin is welcome to come back here, Helen. We’ll keep the resort going for you two awhile longer. We can provide everything you need.”

“Thank you, but I really need to get home.” Lorena Huff meant well, but I was starting to feel bludgeoned by her hospitality.

The Flora who emerged from the train looked uncharacteristically in charge. In a simple gray suit sprigged with tiny white flowers, her hair secured in a businesslike knot beneath a little hat with a demure veil, she could pass for the fancy governess Mrs. Huff had accused my father of hiring. I could see Lorena Huff revising her estimate of the emotional girl she had seen reading Nonie’s letters at the funeral reception.

I ran to Flora and flung my arms around her.

“My goodness!” she exclaimed, surprised. “You seem glad to see me.”

“Let’s go
straight home
,” I hissed into her neck.

“Well, of course,” she said. “Where else would we go?”

“Just don’t accept any invitation, okay?”

“Okay,” she repeated, giving my shoulders an encouraging little shake before stepping over to greet Mrs. Huff and Rachel. The dreaded invitation was offered, and I was impressed at how maturely Flora got out of it.

“No, I’m not at all exhausted,” she said. “I brought Mrs.
Anstruther’s letters to keep me company during the trip. They always inspire me. I read them over, and it was like hearing her voice tell me what to do next. Helen’s grandmother and I corresponded for six years, you know. You’ve taken such good care of Helen, Mrs. Huff. Just look how brown these girls are! But now I want to get her right home and settle us into our summer routine.”

However, Flora’s arrival that day was to mark the high point of my faith in her.

IV.

My one solace during the week at the Huffs’ had been planning the historical tour of the house I would give Flora the day she arrived. I had played it back and forth in my head, room by room, hearing my own narrating voice. First thing, we’d head straight up to settle her in her room. Flora had slept in this room on her two previous visits to this house, first when she stayed on after my mother’s funeral and then back in March, when she came up for Nonie’s funeral. She had already been told we called this upstairs front room, which opened out on the west porch, the Willow Fanning room, after a Recoverer who had stayed in it a year and a half while convalescing from a nervous breakdown. But there were other layers to reveal, the sort you wouldn’t tell a regular guest, not even a cousin visiting for family funerals. I had planned to drop a few hints about my father’s attachment to Willow Fanning when he was sixteen, maybe even going so far as to foreshadow their ill-fated elopement. My father shouldn’t mind, he was “an old guy” now, as he kept saying, and if he did mind, well, too bad. It was he who had chosen to make Flora an intimate of our family for the summer. I would tell just enough to make her feel she was being
inducted into a private family story, and if she proved a worthy listener I would dole out more details. I might also allude to other noteworthy Recoverers on Flora’s first day. The point was to draw her into the ways of Old One Thousand and make her my ally in keeping things going the way they had always been. And what better start than Flora’s having just reread Nonie’s letters on the train!

But Flora completely derailed my plans by making us stop first in the kitchen, where she proceeded to unpack her luggage. Out of an old carpetbag, whose threadbare state had embarrassed me when Lorena Huff was lifting it into the back of her station wagon, came a sack of flour, filled mason jars, and an entire ham. And then from her suitcase Flora parted a meager layer of personal garments and lifted out a sack of cornmeal, which she held in one arm like a baby while she plucked out tea bags, a tin cake box, and some wax paper parcels of what looked like dead grass. With a sigh of fulfillment she deposited these items on the counter.

“You didn’t need to bring tea bags,” I said. “And we already have flour and cornmeal.”

“Well, I wasn’t sure. And I never go anywhere anymore without my self-rising flour. In a pinch, you can make biscuits with it and mayonnaise. I baked them for my teacher-training group last winter and they came out perfect every time. And this cornmeal is stone-ground at a mill near where we live. Now, Helen, you’ll have to show me where everything goes.”

“What are those dried-up old things in the wax paper?”

“These are Juliet’s famous herbs. For spaghetti sauce and to enhance our everyday dishes.”

“Juliet who?”

“Juliet Parker. Don’t you know her name? She raised your mother and me.”

“You mean that old Negro who lived with you?”

“There’s a lot more to Juliet than that. And she’s not old. Now this apple-cured ham is from your uncle Sam. He picked it out especially for you.”

“Uncle Sam owns the meat market and has been separated from his wife for ages and ages,” I said.

Flora needed to know that I was familiar with the names that mattered in my mother’s past.

“Well, he’s the part owner with his friend Ben Timms. Ben and your uncle Sam and my daddy worked in the iron mines together when they were young. Uncle Sam is getting remarried. I mean he and Aunt Garnet are going to get remarried. They were never divorced, but they want to renew their vows and make a fresh beginning. Isn’t that sweet?”