Perfect Reader (14 page)

10

Poems

C
YNTHIA’S GUESTS HAD LEFT
by the time Flora arrived, and Cynthia was in the kitchen, wearing a vintage apron—the kind that tied, impractically, around the waist, a half skirt—washing up.

“I’m sorry it’s late,” Flora said. “I couldn’t get away any earlier.” She wasn’t that late, was she? Had there even been any guests to begin with?

“Not at all,” Cynthia said. “It’s nicer this way. We’ll get a chance to talk.”

She untied her apron and led Flora into the living room. The furniture was scarlet-hued, dainty, skinny-ankled, and Victorian, made for a time when people were smaller. Two longhaired, owl-faced white cats sat plumply on twin burgundy chairs, their paws tucked under them, like steeping kettles.

“Andy and Pablo,” Cynthia said. “Complete prima donnas, as you might expect.”

The walls were covered with art, like a giant collage, painting and painting upon drawing and drawing. The effect was oppressive and beautiful. Landscapes and portraits, and Flora thought she recognized one of her father’s watercolors among the mayhem—a blur of copper fox dashing through wintry birches. She tried to picture her father sitting amid all this. Was this a room he’d enjoyed spending time in? Where had they spent most of their time together? Here? Or at his house, where Paul said they’d “shacked up”? Flora’s curiosity was uncomfortable—an almost perverted urge to riffle through all of Cynthia’s belongings, to ransack the place.

“Do you mind if I use the bathroom?” she asked.

“Well, of course not.” Cynthia pointed down the hall. “First door on your left.”

Well, of course it would be the first door, the trip there offering no new insights. And the bathroom itself was a great disappointment—only toilet, sink, and mirror. No medicine cabinet. The full bath no doubt upstairs with all the other areas of interest. The wallpaper of the little room was bright and blooming, rife with obscene pink peonies. And on the marble sink, beside the delicate china soap dish, was a single bottle of perfume. Flora removed the cap and breathed in. Yes, that was what Cynthia smelled like. Slightly musky, powdery, and sweet. Flora’s mother had never worn perfume—scents of all sorts gave her headaches. Flora had to stop herself from dotting some onto her wrist. She made herself flush the toilet and wash her hands and return to the living room and sit beside Cynthia on the love seat. On the round glass coffee table before them, in a dove gray ceramic pot, a blood-red orchid displayed its private parts.

“It’s a lovely house,” Flora said. Perhaps that would incite a tour.

“Oh, it’s nice enough. A bit dark for my taste. The ceilings a little low. I know I should be grateful, living in subsidized housing, but at my age it makes one feel vulnerable to have one’s roof contingent on one’s employment.”

That’s right—it was a Darwin faculty house. Flora thought she remembered someone else living there, some friend of her mother, when she was younger. Home ownership in a town like Darwin, a college town, extravagant, like travel by private jet or elective surgeries. When her father had bought his house, it had come as a surprise, a sign that life had changed again. Professors didn’t buy; they rented from the college at a discount. It was the Darwin way—the landlessness of the intelligentsia, the feudalism of academia, keeping the serfs dependent and bound to the manor, always within walking distance.

“Anyway, enough complaints. How
are
you?” Cynthia asked, as though they were dear old friends in need of a catch-up.

“I’m fine.”

“Good. I’ve always loved Thanksgiving, since my girlhood. I was the eldest of five, so it was a huge affair.”

The eldest of five. As an only child, Flora regarded the idea of siblings with fascination, in the way she found mythical creatures fascinating—as though they occurred only in art, or other cultures. Growing up, Flora often fantasized about having a sister—part rival, part ally. A sister would be nice right now, today. If she had a sister, one of them could keep Cynthia distracted while the other searched the house.

“What was that like?”

“Oh, the family? Noisy,” Cynthia said. “Complete chaos.”

But Flora could see she did not want to go back in memory, or not that far. “Were you and my father planning to celebrate the holiday together?” She was an investigative reporter, trying to uncover, to verify, to retrace.

“We hadn’t talked about it, but I’d assumed we were, since he said that you would be with your mother.” Flora watched as Cynthia’s eyes filled with tears. “I miss him terribly,” she said.

Was this openness, as Madeleine had suggested, an act, a cover? Was it a ploy to get at what she was after? Or were they all too guarded, too closed to recognize a certain kind of innocence when they encountered it? Flora wondered if she should reach out to Cynthia, put her hand on her arm or shoulder, say something kind.

“I know,” she said. It was the best she could do, but it was quite enough for Cynthia.

“I’d never been married, never had children,” she said. “I’d lived my whole adult life alone and I was used to it, good at it even. But when your father and I … He broke me of the habit, and now, here I am in my sixties and suddenly, for the first time, I’m no good at it.”

Cynthia, in profile, looked a little like Flora’s mother. The Lewis Dempsey type, maybe. Joan would not be caught dead in Cynthia’s wardrobe, or in her perfume, and she would say that Cynthia’s living room made her feel the walls were closing in on her, but they shared a look—narrow, smooth-skinned faces, boldly featured, light-eyed. Both of them beautiful, but their beauty unexpected, something you didn’t notice right away.

“Did you and my dad talk of getting married?”

“Oh, Flora, we hadn’t gotten there yet.” Cynthia placed her cool hand for just an instant over Flora’s hand. “At our age, romantic notions of marriage seem slightly preposterous. Perhaps we would have done it eventually, but then only for practical reasons.”

Flora said nothing. She knew enough to know that practical reasons meant money. Was that what Cynthia wanted from her—her father’s money? Did she feel she had earned it, that she was owed an inheritance of her own?

“I guess marriage is not in the cards for me. Not now,” Cynthia said. “But what about you? Is there someone in your life?”

Is there someone in your life?
A terrifying question. “No,” Flora said. There was no one in her life, no someone at all.

An awkward silence seeped into the busy room.

“How do you fill your time—since?” Flora asked. This seemed to her the quintessential question, the part of life she hadn’t been able to sort out. Filling time. Spending it. How was it done?

“Oh, I’m working on a book, nearing the end. On Turner. And I’m teaching, and students have a way of filling up one’s time. I have friends I see. This and that. Most of all, I wish it were spring. I love to garden. In spring and summer, I’m always in the yard, kneeling in the soil. Last summer, I spent a lot of time in your father’s garden. I keep feeling all of this would be made a bit easier if I could just spend Sundays in the garden.”

Flora’s father, Cynthia explained, would read out on the lawn chair or the hammock, and keep her company while she worked, calling out passages when something seized him. To Flora, such scenes had a whiff of servant and master: Cynthia kneeling, digging; her father reclining, edifying. “Didn’t he ever help you?” she asked.

“Oh, of course he helped, gathering my weeds and prunings, tidying up after me, and he was always offering to do more, and I would show him how to do certain things. Most of all, he loved learning the names of plants. You know how he felt about proper nouns. But it wasn’t work for me, discovering a new garden like that. I didn’t mind at all. I loved every minute.”

“I was wondering who’d been tending those flower beds,” Flora said. “They look like they were lovely.”

“But what about you, Flora? What are your plans?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have any plans.”

“That’s probably wise. For what it’s worth, people keep telling me you shouldn’t make any big decisions or life changes in the first year after you lose someone.”

Flora hated that phrase.
Lost, passed, passed away—
the passive euphemisms of grief. She hadn’t lost anything. Something had been taken, not lost. “It’s a little late for me for that advice,” she said. “I mean, I’m here. I seem to have left my whole life behind and moved back to Darwin.”

“You did what you had to do,” Cynthia said quickly. “Your father would call such bromides ‘psychobabble’ anyway.”

“Yes, he would.”

Cynthia shook her head. “At moments, certain expressions—you’re so like him, it’s scary.”

Flora blushed with pleasure. Funny how the thought of being like one’s parents could be simultaneously a source of dread and delight. “Really?” she asked.

“Yes, really,” Cynthia said. “I used to get a little jealous, you know. The way your father spoke of you. The long phone conversations you two would have sometimes after dinner.” She seemed to read Flora’s expression and paused. “I know how strange it must be for you, that I was there, in the background, through all that.”

“He was the only person I liked talking to on the phone,” Flora said. “His phone calls were like great letters. You know, notable anecdotes described in careful detail. No
How’s the weather
—unless it was relevant to a story—no
Have you taken care of such and such?
Just good stories.
You’ll never believe whom I ran into …
and he was off.” To be able to remember him with someone else who had loved him was rare and new. She smiled at Cynthia for the first time since she’d arrived.

Cynthia stood up abruptly and disappeared down the hall, as though the smile were the signal she’d been waiting for. Her footsteps hurried past the little bathroom. A light went on. Flora could hear a drawer opening, then closing again. When Cynthia returned, she held a stack of papers in her hand. She pushed aside the orchid and placed them on the coffee table in front of Flora.

“I’ve been dying to talk to you about them,” Cynthia said. She was beaming. She looked like the proudest woman on earth. “Aren’t they exquisite?”

“I’m sorry,” Flora said, staring at her. “What?”

“The poems,” Cynthia said. “Your father’s poems.”

In spite of all the evidence now before her—the papers, Cynthia’s face, what she slowly recognized to be an inscription in her father’s handwriting across the top of the first page—Flora could not bring herself to believe that Cynthia knew of the poems’ existence, that she possessed them, that she had read them. Flora was his one and only reader. She was the one he trusted.

“I know your father gave you a copy,” Cynthia said. “He was so eager to know what you thought of them.”

A copy? Flora looked more closely at the inscription: “For my darling Cynthia,” it read in a twilight blue ink, “without whom these poems never would have been. L.”

“What did you think of them?” Cynthia pressed.

“I didn’t know,” Flora said stupidly. “I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about them with you.”

Cynthia looked down, wounded. “No, of course not,” she said. “I understand.”

“I’m just surprised. I didn’t realize.”

“I shouldn’t have sprung this on you,” Cynthia said. “I seem to keep doing that.”

Flora wanted to reach for the stack of poems, Cynthia’s poems, to touch them, to mess them, to hear that sound fingers make against paper, but she didn’t trust herself; she felt as though her hands were shaking. She clasped her fingers together and pressed them into her lap.

“But I should tell you”—Cynthia was beaming again—“I’ve spoken with an old friend of mine, an editor, and I sent him a small sample of the poems, and he’s quite interested. He thinks they’re eminently publishable—that’s what he told me.”

Flora stood up. Those were her poems. Her father had left them to her. “It’s late,” she said.

“Yes.” Cynthia picked up the manuscript. “We’ve made it through this holiday. This long, long day.” She walked Flora to the door, clutching the poems to her chest. “He’s a wonderful editor. He’d be so right for your father’s work. Truly. I think you’d like him a great deal. And whenever you’re ready to talk, Flora, I’ll be here.”

“Good night,” Flora said.

She drove slowly through the empty streets of Darwin. No one, it appeared, had anywhere to be but safely ensconced in their snug country houses, giving silent thanks for their good fortune. Except for the occasional upstairs light shining optimistically into the night, most of the houses were dark, her own destination the darkest of them all. She went in, and without turning on the lights, she found her way upstairs, Larks padding after her. In the body bag on the floor of the room called hers sat the poems. She grabbed the bag and took it into her father’s bedroom. She switched on the lamp and opened the folder. There was no inscription on her copy, and looking closer, she noticed what she hadn’t seen before, that it was just that—a copy.

Gemlike. Subtle and spare. Startlingly original. Timeless. The commonplace rendered miraculous. The miraculous in the commonplace. Astonishing depth. Vividly realized
. The ubiquitous blurbspeak of poetry, the extravagant clichés, the lexicon like that of wine—silly and bewildering.