Perfect Reader (25 page)

19

The End of School

S
PRING WAS
D
ARWIN’S PLEASANTEST
and briefest season, a breezy layover between the cold damp of winter and the hot damp of summer, though spring this year had come in winter and seemed unlikely now to fully flourish. March 21, the equinox, in a parallel universe Flora’s parents’ wedding anniversary. Anniversaries, birthdays, all the little holidays—how relentlessly and routinely we mark time; revenge, perhaps, for all the ways time marks us. But in this universe, the date marked only the end of spring break, and the fast approach of an academic deadline, the first Flora had suffered in years. The assignment was to write an imitation of one of the poets they’d read in the first half of the semester, and even though she was auditing the class, Carpenter had urged her, in his patronizing, jolly way, to give it a stab. Couldn’t she give him a stab instead? But no, she’d said she would try. So she sat at her father’s typewriter, trying. But the phone was harder than usual to ignore. It harassed and harassed. Finally, she answered.

“Have you seen the
Witness?”
It was Madeleine. They’d been away in Mongolia, visiting Georgia. Flora hadn’t known they were back.

“Hey! How are you? What witness?”

“The Darwin Witness
, the student paper.”

“No, why, should I have?”

“I’ll be right over.”

“Christ. Breaking news? Have they admitted a Republican?”

“Just hold on. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

She was there in less—the first time, Flora guessed, Madeleine had ever been inside her father’s house. She entered without knocking, placed the paper down on the butcher block, and smacked her hand against the offending article, which lay in the bottom right corner of the front page, below a story on disputes with the town over the proposed building of a new auditorium.

D
EMPSEY’S
P
OSTHUMOUS
C
ONTRIBUTION
TO
W
ORLD OF
P
OETRY

President emeritus and Sterling Professor of the Humanities Lewis Dempsey was renowned for his scholarly contributions to the study of poetry. But according to a source close to the family, the author of the popular works of criticism
Reader as Understander
and
Beyond Tess
, who died suddenly this October of a heart attack, had in the last year of his life completed a collection of poems.

The fate of the manuscript is uncertain. Professor Dempsey’s only daughter, Flora Dempsey, was named his literary executor and apparently has no plans for publication.

“There was interest from a publisher, but Ms. Dempsey declined,” the source, who asked not to be named, told the
Witness
. Her reasons for declining are unclear.

“It’s sad, really,” the source said. “Those poems are the only hold she has on her father.”

Professor of art history and theory Cynthia Reynolds also has a stake in the posthumous collection. She is allegedly in possession of the original manuscript, a handwritten document, and was the one to seek out the prospective publisher. Dr. Reynolds did not return a phone call requesting comment. Ms. Dempsey could not be reached.

Flora read it twice. Was this, really, her life? Who knew of the poems? Cynthia, of course, who did not return a call, and Paul, bound by legal codes of confidentiality, if nothing else. Madeleine, but here she was, practically dewy with intrigue and surprise and with the impenetrable alibi of Mongolia. And then there was Carpenter, with all his Internet innuendo, who clearly knew something—back now to his Deep Throating?

“That prick,” Flora said.

“Which prick?”

“Sidney Carpenter. I know he’s done this sort of anonymous-sourcing bullshit for the
Witness
before. My father used to complain about it.”

“But he’s hardly ‘a source close to the family,’” Madeleine said.

“Fuck. I was actually starting to like him a little.” Flora ripped the page out of the paper and stuck it to the fridge with the Darwin Dodo magnet.
Ms. Dempsey declined; Ms. Dempsey could not be reached
. She did not like the headline: dempsey’s posthumous contribution. As though he’d made his contributions after death. Like reading his obituary in the real paper: lewis dempsey, president emeritus of darwin college, is dead at 68.
Is
dead. The shock of the present tense—that eternal present. The immediacy of it. And grammatically awkward to the ear.

“It’s sad, really,”
Flora mocked. “Please. He doesn’t think it’s sad. He’s pleased as punch at the thought of some Dempsey familial feud. And he always insisted on calling me, rather officiously,
Ms. Dempsey
, as he does here.”

“Couldn’t it have been someone else?” Madeleine asked. “Someone other than Sid Carpenter?”

“Who, Madeleine? I can see you’re thinking of someone in particular.”

“What about Dr. Reynolds?”

“Cynthia?”

“You said she kept pressing you. And how would Carpenter know she had the original manuscript, or that it was a ‘handwritten document’?”

As much as she wanted not to like Cynthia, Flora didn’t believe she’d deliberately wound her, not with the memory of her father hanging over them so nearly. “And writing that she didn’t return a call, what’s that—ruse, cover-up? A whole lot of subterfuge for a little college paper, isn’t it?”

“That’s just it—the trouble they go to over trifles. You know the famous line on academia: ‘The battles are so bitterly fought because the stakes are so small.’” Madeleine’s green eyes vibrated with excitement. She was alive with the thought of Cynthia’s betrayal. She’d been critical from the start. “Hungry and ambitious,” she’d said. Maybe Madeleine was projecting, or transferring, sublimating her own antipathy. Or was Cynthia that sneaky, that hungry?

The phone rang again. “Are you going to get that?” Madeleine asked.

“I hate the telephone,” Flora said, peevish, childish. “Go to hell,” she yelled toward the receiver. “I wish I’d been born in Victorian times.” It rang itself out.

“You sure? No Tampax, no birth control?”

“Why do people always go to those examples? As though the tampon were the sine qua non of the twentieth-century woman.”

“You want other examples? Do you enjoy the right to vote, or inherit property?”

They both moved their eyes around the room.

“Fine,” Flora said. “I wish I’d been born a man in Victorian times.”

“Cold damp houses, bad teeth.”

“Okay—a rich man with many servants to tend the fires in Victorian times. I’ve never cared much for perfect teeth anyway.”

“I remember your dressing up in that red velvet bonnet and brown calico dress your mother made you when you were in the thick of your Laura Ingalls Wilder obsession. You were always making everyone else play poor blind Mary, or some other less desirable part. You always got to be Laura, no matter what.” Of course by “everyone else,” Madeleine meant Georgia. It was the closest they’d come to their brief shared life. “All little girls, I imagine, play dress up, but for you it wasn’t play. It was serious.”

“Am I still like that?” Flora heard herself ask. “Am I the same as I was then?”

“You seem pretty grown up to me,” Madeleine said.

“My dad said I looked young—‘not a day over sixteen, little Flora-Girl.’”

“You think he was right about everything? Maybe he had his own reasons for keeping you young.”

There were so many versions of oneself and others to keep track of. The perspectives positively Cubist. Madeleine’s version of her father, and Carpenter’s, Cynthia’s, and her own. There was the version of Flora standing in her father’s kitchen, the one pinned to the refrigerator, the one making Georgia play poor blind Mary.

“I wonder where that calico dress is,” Flora said. “Probably my mom tossed it in one of the moves. I remember I had a miniature chalkboard, too—that was my ‘slate’ for my ‘lessons’—and paddock boots, and the pigtails, of course. All the accoutrements. Very important to have the proper accessories. As though through the objects I might channel the person.” Funny the things you didn’t know you knew about yourself. She could not have said that to her mother, who would hold it against her, would shake her head and make some clever remark.

“We all have our magical ways of channeling the past,” Madeleine said.

We do?
Flora wanted to say.
What are yours?
But such questions would intrude. Without saying anything Madeleine made it clear the personal was inaccessible. A great well of reserve moated her, and raised Flora’s own reserve. She did not ask about “The Wizard,” ask whether what her father described in that poem had occurred, or whether it was just a fantasy, another alteration of the long-dead past. She did not tell her things with Paul were likely ruined or at least finished when Madeleine asked after him and said what a nice time they’d had at dinner.

“Yes” was all Flora said. “You guys are the best.” Then she asked, “How was Mongolia?”

Madeleine’s eyes darted and filled and she turned her head away from Flora. “Good,” she said, knuckling under her eyes. “Truly, it was. But a mother never stops worrying. I wish she were a little closer. I wish her life were a little easier.”

Flora knew it was not her fault, that she was no longer the cause of Madeleine’s worries over Georgia, that the long drop from the side of the President’s House did not end in a yurt on the Mongolian steppes. Or did it? She wished Madeleine could reassure her, exonerate her, tell her that they’d told Georgia all about her, that when Georia’s fieldwork was complete and she returned they would all have dinner together as though the past were not the past.

Larks had watched the conversation attentively and now Madeleine knelt down and consented to a face licking.

“It’s good to have something small to take care of, isn’t it?” she said. “It keeps you soft.”

Flora watched their mutual happiness. “Or it forces you to see your lack of softness,” she said.

“What will you do now?” Madeleine asked as she left. “Confront the enemy wheresoever she may lie?”

“He,” Flora corrected, letting the screen door slam shut.

She returned to her father’s typewriter. She could write her imitation as a fuck off to Carpenter:
They fuck you up, your professors. They really mean to, and they do
. But what was the use of highbrow tell-offs? Poetry—so thick and fast with hints and murmurs, allusion and illusion (she used to confuse the two). She preferred the free, direct style. Say what you mean, she sometimes felt when reading a poem. Better to tell it plain than slant. “I’m puzzled, Flora,” Cynthia had said, when what she meant was “I’m furious,” or “I don’t like you much.”
It’s sad, really
, the source who asked not to be named sneered.

“Dear Professor Carpenter,” she typed. The round keys clanked. One had to push, to mean it—none of the neurotic sensitivity of the computer keypad. Flora was not a touch typist like her mother—who liked to say it was the thing she did best in the world—but neither did she rely solely on her index fingers as her father had his. She was somewhere in between.

She wrote:

I had begun to assume that the grievance between you and my father had been utterly petty, or at least a problem of his own making. But by exposing to public scrutiny in the pages of the
Witness
a personal family matter of significance mainly to me and others who loved my father, you have proved that his mistrust of you was not ill-founded. It was wrong of me, and perhaps disloyal, to have reached out to you this semester. Please consider this notice a formal withdrawal from your class.

Flora Dempsey

She sealed it in an envelope, addressed to his office in the English Department, and walked toward campus with Larks. She would slide it under his door, rendering it irretrievable. She did not want tact or restraint to curb this impulse, which seemed the first good one she’d had in months. Perhaps she had signed up with Carpenter as a way to stick it to her father. Perhaps Carpenter was right: The poems were the only hold she had left on him. Perhaps none of it mattered.

Outside, it was warmer than she’d expected, one of those early days when winter has broken and everyone is young. She took off her coat and tied it around her waist. Larks rioted in the emergence of new smells. College Hill was budding with undergraduates, listening to music, talking, laughing, sitting on the still-damp ground in groups, wearing fewer articles of clothing than the weather allowed. Flora had channeled the appropriate righteous indignation for her letter, her moral and wounded objection to behavior unfair and mean-spirited. But weaving her way through the nests of students, panting her way to the top of the steep incline, she felt as she had when walking back to the President’s House with Georgia in the middle of the day, the injustice of school behind them, the freedom of betrayal and adventure in front. She wanted to listen to her own music, to strip down like the undergrads and stay up late.