Perfect Reader (5 page)

Flora unplugged the machine and returned it to the trash can. Was that what she had done, offer condolences? It hadn’t quite felt like it. Flora needed air. She opened windows, one-handed, to let the cool air into the house. She needed to call her mother, who would be worried by now. She needed to read; there was so much reading to do. Her father had left her an assignment, she’d inherited homework—his essays and reviews, his new, secret poems. Well, thanks, Dad. Just what I wanted. How could he not have told her? Was she a child, best kept in the dark? She’d been too depressed to withstand his happiness? It seemed unlikely; she doubted thoughtfulness had been the true root of his withholding.

She grabbed the thick green woolen blanket from the back of the couch and went outside and climbed into the hammock, which hung on the edge of the yard between two tall, near-leafless maples. She cocooned herself in the blanket. The irregular fall moon sat low in the sky, pale and sheepish at its early arrival. A breeze came up and sent the fallen leaves panicking across the lawn. When she was little, Flora never understood how a hammock could be relaxing. It seemed vulnerable, on the verge of collapse—foolish. She hadn’t then been afraid of heights, or dares, or other things she should have been afraid of, but she’d been afraid of hammocks. Now, as she let her body sink down, she felt herself floating up, untethered. At the very least, she’d progressed on the hammock front.

Cynthia Reynolds, her father’s girlfriend. Or, what word did one use at their age?
Partner? Lover?
How revolting. Though there had been the occasional other person, neither of her parents had remarried (or not that she was aware of). “Your mother cured me of marriage,” her father had told her once, long ago, a pithy little phrase she tried to unhear, to unremember. In life, he had not wanted his daughter and his lover to know one another. So how could Cynthia say that in death his mind would change? And it was nervy, wasn’t it, insinuating herself into the funeral planning—“You know that predilection of his,” she’d said smugly. He’d never mentioned those Hardy poems to Flora. Though it was true that her father had planned his own funeral—casually mentioning over a meal a particular piece of music he’d like played, or whom he would or would not like to speak. When years back a famous pianist received an honorary degree from Darwin, her father cheerfully announced, “We hit it off. I’m sure he’d be willing to play for me. When I go, try to track him down.” Though the man had been older. Why had her father assumed he would be the first to die? And, as it turned out, the pianist was busy, booked already on that date in December when the memorial would be held, a concert in Berlin, though terribly sorry to miss it. Her father was an exceptional man, et cetera, et cetera. Making the arrangements was now an act of recall. Which Beethoven trio had her father preferred? What was it he said about the dean of students? Why had she not taken notes? Worse, she had tried not to listen. She’d said, “Dad, can we please talk about something else?”

It was her mother who remembered—though Flora worried her information was out-of-date. It was the
Archduke
Trio. And it must be performed live. The conductor of the student orchestra could recommend the best players. The dean of students should be discouraged from eulogizing. Ira Rubenstein would be too distraught to read his own words, but he could choose some other text. The idea of her mother planning her father’s funeral was wrong; he wouldn’t like it. But Flora did need help, and she didn’t want Cynthia’s. Who else had known him so well? And her mother wouldn’t sabotage his funeral, would she? Or would she? The brilliant final act of revenge: the wrong music, the wrong words.

What had life been like, in the city, before Georgia? Flora could not remember life before.

“They’re in love,” Flora heard her mother say to Georgia’s mother, Madeleine, in a laughing voice, a mocking voice.

“I know,” Madeleine said. “It’s the sweetest thing.”

But it was true; Flora loved Georgia with the full ferocity of her eight-year-old feelings. Georgia, an only child, too, accustomed to occupying long hours alone—reading, inventing homework assignments for herself, tending to the small furry creatures whose aquariums lined the walls of her bedroom—accepted Flora’s ardor gratefully. She slept over at the President’s House most weekends, the bottom bunk of Flora’s new bunk beds quickly hers. They spelled out their names in glow-in-the-dark star stickers across their respective headboards—labeling, claiming—
FLORA
and
GEORGIA
.

“Like sisters,” everyone said.

But they weren’t sisters—for starters, they looked nothing alike: Georgia with her bark brown bob, her warm smudgy eyes, her roundness of face, and Flora, even then angular, her ever-darkening blond hair in braids nearly to her waist, her mother having decided the experience of forcing her to trim them was one not worth repeating. Yes, Flora and Georgia were both only children, but the similarities between their families ended there. Georgia called her mother Madeleine and her father Ray and they all had the same last name, McNair-Wallach, each parent taking a small but essential part of the other as their own. Hyphenated last names were big in Darwin, like tofu, and recycling, and Flora found their collective hyphenate—the outward manifestation of the mutuality of their merging—annoying. Flora’s mother had taken her father’s name, but he had not taken hers, and she liked to say, seeing her full name in print, that it made her feel like an imposter. “Who is that woman?” she’d ask coyly, examining an envelope addressed to her. “Have we met?”

Flora and Georgia were not sisters: They were better than sisters; they were partners in crime; they were spies contriving ways into the neighbors’ houses; they were invincible and indivisible. The President’s House—the setting of their romance—invited gamesmanship and danger. A mansion invites make-believe, makes pretense and delusion easy. Living there, Flora imagined she was a princess, with almost no effort. And just as effortlessly she imagined she was an orphan, and a runaway, and a prisoner. She and Georgia played hide-and-seek, of course, and Pollyanna, a game loosely modeled on the Hayley Mills movie, in which Flora was a paralyzed saint and Georgia her devoted nurse, pushing her around the long hallways on the large red leather desk chair with its sticky wheels, their roles always the same—Flora the brave invalid, Georgia the patient caregiver. With the Ghost Game, they created a complicated world, in which the giant portraits in the foyer of Darwin alumni of minor historical note came alive at night and the girls became tour guides, shuttling big groups of no one through the house as though it were a ghost museum, inventing and narrating the biographies of the men in the paintings, what they had done in life and what they did when they returned from the dead. One of the paintings, above the staircase, a life-size, full-body portrait of an officer in the Civil War, with an elaborate uniform and a sword taller than Flora, wandered around murmuring, “Have you seen my horse?” The staircase itself, with its darkly gleaming mahogany banister and a landing as long as a hallway, invited jumping contests. They would jump down, four, five, six steps at a time, hurling their bodies onto the itchy beige carpet below, Flora pushing—“Just one more”—and Georgia hesitating—“Maybe we’ve gone high enough for today.”

When they tired of contests, they invented rides. Flora’s bedroom had two doors, one leading to the hallway, the other to her father’s study, and she and Georgia would each climb onto the doorknobs, hoist themselves up to the tops, and sit there and swing back and forth, each on her respective door, talking for hours until they heard the footsteps of approaching adults, and they would throw themselves to the ground, bruising, scuffing, laughing. Many of Flora’s childhood memories involved hitting the ground hard—hitting the ground was one of life’s daily realities. Rug burns standard; scabs eternal. Jumping from stairs, doors, trees, bicycles. Looking back, one’s childhood body seemed so resilient and catlike, bendable and unbreakable—or almost so.

Together, they played Annie. They were orphans escaping from the orphanage and the tyrannical Miss Hannigan. They climbed out the window on the third floor to the ladder that ran along the side of the house—the old fire escape Flora’s mother had declared off-limits, barring any actual emergency. Gripping the metal rungs, the chipping black paint scratching their palms, they climbed down, slowly, carefully, hand under hand, tentative foot below foot, all the way to the ground, and then they climbed back up, into the sky, and then down again, and up, and again, and again, as though they were rewinding a tape, each time risking anew discovery, and capture, and death.

3

Literary Executioners

T
HE
C
ROSS
C
OLLEGE
L
IBRARY
was named for the wealthy Darwin alumnus who financed its building in the 1960s, but it was often mistaken for some sort of religious institution at the center of campus, and once, in the ’90s, protested by a group of Jewish students who refused to study in a shrine to Christian iconography. This was where her father’s first editions and rarer books would be moving as soon as Flora went through and packed them up. She remembered visiting the library as a child in that first year in Darwin, and looking up her father’s name in the most recent volume of
Who’s Who in America
. There he was, listed and defined in the encyclopedia of Americans. Her father was a Who. He existed not only in the world but, indelibly, in print. Important people existed in books.

Now she was there for him again, this time to research literary executors, the elite fellowship to which she had newly been appointed. Research, in Darwin, had to be done elsewhere. The house was not equipped. Her father lived without technology, and so Flora lived without technology. He had never even had an e-mail account, or at least not one he checked. He’d been loyal to his Smith Corona portable, shunning the computer with impressive tenacity. A cell phone was as preposterous to him as a handheld refrigerator. “Why bring the inside outside?” had been his line on people listening to music while jogging or walking their dogs, back in the early days of the Walkman.

Though Flora hadn’t visited him, her father had come to the city every few months. He’d stay with Rubie, who lived nearby, meeting Flora for eggs and bacon at the diner near her office before she went to work, and taking her to dinner and sometimes the opera after (always the Italians was his rule, and preferably Verdi), these occasions strangely datelike—the heightened excitement of a special occasion, the dressing up, the one-on-oneness. The post-divorce romance one has with one’s parents. “We haven’t put a foot wrong,” he’d tell her, patting her hand, as they waited for the curtain to rise, “not a foot wrong, my Flora-Girl.”

It was on the last visit that he’d given her his poems over breakfast.

“Appallingly rough,” he’d told her before handing her the folder agape with words he had written. “Some good bits, though, I think.”

She’d asked if anyone else had read them yet, and he’d shaken his head.

“You’re the reader I trust most.”

A flattering phrase she repeated in the privacy of her mind.

It was enjoyable, being in a library. It had been a while. The design was universally acclaimed: dark wooden beams punctuating tall, thick walls of glass—at night it was said to glow like a paper lantern. Libraries often smelled of ignored dust and generations of book crumbs, but this one had a pleasing air of sterility. A few stoop-shouldered students read nearby, foreheads folding into books as though study were an act of osmosis, while Flora trolled the Internet for stories, many of which seemed more the stuff of fiction than of life and death. She read of Ted Hughes’s zany spinster sister, who’d built a fortress around her brother and Plath’s poems; of the obsessive and controlling Joyce heir, bane of scholars and Bloomsday fanatics alike—a professional ruiner of all Joyce-related fun; of J. R. R. Tolkien’s kin, still writing his father’s books; and of Dmitri Nabokov, with his jaunty conversations with ghost dad. Apparently, good old ghost dad thought his son should publish, and profit.

Were they all crazy before they filled the role of executor, or was it the post-death nomination that had unfurled, flaglike, the full neuroses of those familial relations?
Executor—
it sounded much like
executioner
. I am his Literary Executioner, Flora thought. The Lord High Literary Executioner.

It was a paradoxical position: at once powerful and subservient, generous and greedy. To control someone else’s free expression—a power one should never hold. How muddled protectiveness and professional jealousy could become. Was it better to share everything, or was that slatternly? The impossible requirement of reading, among many, many other things, the mind of the dead—what would he want? Writers wanted readers, no? That was why they wrote. But what sorts of readers did they want, and at what point?

There was the added problem that Flora had never read her father’s work. Not the influential
Reader as Understander
, or his later scholarly books; not his regular reviews in
The New Republic;
not even the poems that he had months ago given just to her—the reader he trusted most really the least trustworthy. Had he assumed that she, along with all children of Darwin, was well versed in the Dempsey canon? Or had she somehow duped him into thinking she was reliable and literate?

She heard the strains of talking-whispers and turned. It was Madeleine McNair-Wallach, arguing with the librarian. How many years had it been? She’d cut her hair pixie-short and gone gray, her shoulders gently stooped. Funny, the genericness of aging—bodies that start out so rich and varied resembling one another more and more. Though even the blurring of time could do nothing to diminish Madeleine’s substantial breasts, covered now by a thick green sweater she had probably knit herself. The librarian moved to answer a phone, and Madeleine scanned the high-ceilinged, lofted space.

Would they be happy to see each other? Flora waited for Madeleine’s reaction before releasing one of her own, but she could see from across the room Madeleine suddenly beaming, with surprise and that particular brand of happiness adults display upon seeing those they knew when small.

“Flora Dempsey!” she called out, and then covered her mouth, remembering where she was. The librarian flashed her a look she didn’t notice.

Madeleine was approaching and Flora stood and they held out their arms in unison and then the excruciation of each going for a different cheek and the resulting mid-embrace adjustment.

Flora pulled back. “So nice to see you, Madeleine.”

“Flora Dempsey,” Madeleine said again, the freckles on her nose scrunching, her green eyes darting back and forth as they’d always done when she was absorbed in thought. The constancy of facial expressions—it was reassuring.

“How are you? How are all of you?” Flora asked.

“We’re all all right. I’ve been thinking of you, Flora. Since I heard about your dad. I’ve been trying to find a way to get in touch, but I could only find your mother’s address—I actually sent her a note, hoping she’d pass it on. I didn’t know you were back in town.”

“I didn’t know I’d be here, either. I haven’t been back long. That was sweet of you—to write.”

“What a blow this must be. I know your relationship with him wasn’t always easy, but a man like your father—even when he’s not your father—takes up a lot of space, doesn’t he? His is a large absence, I’d imagine.”

Flora clutched her fingers with her other fingers and looked around, as if sizing up the extent of his absence. How to respond, and what to? This was why she was on the lam from the aggressive condolers. Anything apart from the comforting clichés seemed to Flora almost horrible. “Yes,” she made herself say. “What’s Georgia up to these days?”

“In Mongolia interviewing nomads. It sounds like a punch line every time I say it, but you know Georgia. She’s an anthropologist, finishing her Ph.D. She lives in a yurt. She could do without all the mutton stew, and the various digestive challenges, but other than that, she’s completely at home. I thought Ray and I were pretty intrepid, pretty low-maintenance, but she’s taken it to a new level.” Madeleine spoke with a distant admiration, as if describing a public figure, and not her own child. “You know Georgia,” she said again. “How she throws herself into things.”

“Yes,” Flora said, apparently the highlight of her conversational repertoire. And she felt she knew Georgia. But of course she didn’t anymore. “I can picture her doing that,” she added. “Not that I have an accurate picture—or any real picture—of what Mongolia looks like.”

“Are you picturing sheep? Because if so, I think you’re on the right track.”

“Okay,” Flora said. “I think I see it.”

They both smiled, and their smiles lingered till it seemed they’d run out of things to say.

“I was just using the computer,” Flora said, though Madeleine had seen her sitting there not five minutes before.

“I’m teaching a Freud seminar. It’s the first time I’ve taught it, and of course every conceivable thing has gone wrong with the readings.” Madeleine glanced back at the librarian. Then she leaned in conspiratorially. “That woman is torturing me,” she whispered. “Ray says I killed her cat in a former life.”

Flora wished they could sit. The thought of what she’d done to Madeleine in a former life was stifling in its presence. “How is Ray?” she asked.

“Good, good. He’d love to see you, Flora. It really is amazing to see you after all these years. You look good. I’m sure you’re not—how could you be? But you look it.”

“Well.” Flora, shy-struck and miserable, gestured again to the computer. “It’s really good to see you, too.”

“Maybe you’d come over sometime for dinner? Ray would love it. We both would. I want to hear all about your life.”

“Oh, no, really? I’d love to come, but only if you promise we won’t have to talk about that.”

Madeleine pinched Flora’s shoulder. “Hang in there, kiddo.”

“Okay,” Flora said, tears she hoped were invisible pushing their way up.

“I’ll be in touch,” Madeleine said, leaving her.

Flora sat back down at the computer, staring without sight at the glow of the page. That was it, then. A friendly reunion, old wounds just benign hazy scars whose origins had been forgotten. Or maybe she had suffered enough, finally, to be forgiven. To be welcomed back into the bosom of their perfect family. Darwin’s flawed orphaned daughter—they were ready for her now.

In school, they spent all their time together. They talked constantly. There was so much to talk about. Georgia knew everything. She’d read the encyclopedia, volumes
A
through
S
, though that was a secret only Flora knew. In private, Georgia was proud of that fact, but in public she would be humiliated by it. This was often the way things were then. While they chatted together, their third-grade teacher, Lynn, kind and young, would look at them pleadingly, and then separate them. They were always being separated. This school was different from Flora’s school in the city, where there were only girls, and teachers were called Mister and Missus, and students wore thick maroon uniforms—uniforms Flora had despised and her mother adored, as they meant no more morning arguments over wardrobe. Flora had been taught that last names were polite, but now in Darwin, where everyone insisted on first names, they’d begun to seem rude. This school had no uniforms, no Mister or Missus, and was different in every way.

For one thing, recess was outside, grassy and dirty, whereas back in the city it had been in the sky, on the roof of the school building. At recess in Darwin, Flora loved playing games with the boys, kick-ball and tetherball, and most of all a game called Swedish, which involved pegging other people with the red rubber ball. The rule was whoever got to the field first could choose the game of the day. Flora and Georgia always ran to the field, ran so fast their throats burned and their chests hurt and they couldn’t talk. They almost always got there first. The boys called them Flo-Geo, like the sprinter, and they liked that, having one shared identity.

Third grade meant studying Greek mythology, making togas and bas-relief clay tiles depicting scenes of the pantheon of gods. They were staging a production of
Prometheus Bound
. Georgia was outraged that she couldn’t play Prometheus simply because she was a girl. She deserved the leading role because she was the only one who could remember the lines accurately, who would be true to Aeschylus’s vision of the tragedy. Instead, they were both cast in the chorus. Flora didn’t mind; after all, the chorus got to be onstage the whole time, and wasn’t that the point? But Georgia wrote a letter to Lynn, describing how unfair, and possibly sexist, she found the casting decisions, and so it was decided that Alex Tillman could be Prometheus in the first performance, Georgia in the second. After that, being in the chorus didn’t seem quite as good to Flora.