Flora (13 page)

“When did she tell you that?” I demanded.

“It was probably in one of her letters,” said Flora. “Or, no, I seem to remember her saying something the first time I stayed in that room.” To Finn she explained, “The first time was when I came up for Lisbeth’s funeral. Lisbeth was Helen’s mother. We were raised together in Alabama, Helen’s mother and I. Lisbeth was twelve years older, but we were real close.”

“He doesn’t want to hear all that,” I said.

“I do, I do,” Finn insisted. “I find your whole setup fascinating. You two cousins up here on your private hill. And those Recoverers! You make me wish I were one of them.”

“Oh, they were long before our time,” said Flora.

“Yet she speaks of them as though they’re still in residence,” said Finn. “If I had been one of them, Helen, do you think they would have named a room after me?”

“The Devlin Patrick Finn room,” I tried it out.

“Oh, what a beautiful name,” cried Flora. “Why didn’t you tell me that, Helen? I wish someone had given me a middle name.”

“We can give you one now,” said Finn warmly, leaning forward to touch her on the arm. “What name do you fancy?”

But his sudden intimacy seemed to fluster Flora and, murmuring that she’d need to consider it, she fled to the kitchen to check on something.

The living room was filling with a nostalgic orange light, which made everything look less shabby and more historical.
You couldn’t see the snags on the arms of the yellow silk sofa, which Finn had been sharing with Flora. The carpet was a warm blur of soft-patterned flowers and not a mange of threadbare spots. The windows were open to the sunset in progress and a gentle breeze ruffled the sheer curtains. The scrubbing sounds I had heard the other day, I now realized, had been Flora’s washing the insides of the windowsills.

I had chosen Nonie’s wing chair for myself and was gazing demurely down at my lap because I thought Finn was studying me, but it turned out he was looking at the little painting that hung above my chair.

“Did one of you do that?” he asked.

“No, it was one of the Recoverers,” I said, and went on to quote Nonie: “Starling Peake let us down, but he was happy the day he painted that picture.” I explained that it was the view from our house before it got blocked out.

“You could have it back, the view,” Finn said. “All ye’d need to do is top some trees.”

“It would cost a lot of money,” I said.

“That would depend on who you got to do it. I might be able to help you.”

“I would have to ask my father,” I said, like an ungrateful little prig.

“Well, of course, naturally you would,” Finn replied sportingly, though he blushed with embarrassment.

I was relieved when Flora stood over us, taking charge like an adult and directing us to our seats. “I will bring your plates from the kitchen,” she announced, rosy with her cooking, “so that everything will stay as hot as possible.”

Greed rose in my throat at the sight of the steaming food on the plate, but this was immediately followed by dismay at the
recent image of myself pooching out of my favorite dress. Flora had been stealthily turning me into a fatty with her meals. Unless I was vigilant and changed my habits, my father wouldn’t recognize me when he came home. Finn ate like a hungry man who had been taught not to bolt his food. He praised each item and asked Flora how she managed to have everything including the biscuits come out at the same time, and that, unfortunately, set off an accolade to the person who had taken Flora in hand when she could hardly reach the stove and taught her everything about cooking. It was Juliet Parker this and Juliet that, until I felt I needed to put in that this was their colored maid back in Alabama.

“No, not our maid,” said Flora. “Juliet lived with us. She raised me and Helen’s mother. She was a full member of the household. Why, she’s even—”

“Where do
you
live, Finn?” I interrupted like a rude child, but it was better than having Flora say what I was sure was coming next: that Juliet Parker was part owner of their house.

“I live in an attic storeroom above Mr. Crump’s store. Its washing facilities leave much to be desired, but it’s convenient to the job. They only charge me for linens and utilities, so I can put away a bit.”

“What about your American parents? Will you ever go back to them?”

“That’s a lot of questions, honey,” Flora mildly protested.

“No, no, I don’t mind,” said Finn. “You two have told me something about your lives and now it’s my turn. I get on very well with Grace and Bill. Sure they would love to have me back. Bill would make me a partner in his auto parts business, but I’d like to try my wings first. I’m twenty-two—”

“We’re the same age!” cried Flora. “When is your birthday? Mine was May.”

“Ah, mine was last November, and there’s already the next one looking over my shoulder, so I’d better get cracking.”

“How will you try your wings?” I asked, keeping to the subject.

“I’d like to study engineering or maybe industrial arts.”

“And you’ve got the GI Bill!” cried Flora. “The government will send you to college.”

“Well, I’m not so sure of that,” said Finn. “We’ll have to see how things fall out.”

“But it’s a sure thing,” insisted Flora. “I know several boys in Birmingham who are going to take advantage of it as soon as they’re discharged.”

“But, you see, I’m already discharged. Because of the lung …” Finn tapped his chest. “And then I developed this other complication.” He tapped the side of his head. “Which made me act a bit daft for a while. They dealt with it out at the hospital, but I have to stay here in town and see a doctor out at the hospital once a week until he says I’m my old self again.”

“Was that your mental problem?” I asked.

“Helen, honey—” began Flora.

“It’s all right,” Finn assured her. “It happens to a lot of soldiers. Meanwhile, this mountain air is good for me, and I get to know people like yourselves. How would I ever have met the two of you if I hadn’t been your deliverer?”

The phone rang. “Excuse me,” I said, getting up. “That’s probably my father. I’ll take it in the kitchen.”

“May I speak with Helen?” a voice asked faintly. It was Brian Beale.

“This
is
Helen.”

“Oh. You sound different. I thought it was that lady who’s living with you now.”

“She’s not
living
with us, just staying till my father comes back. Where are you?”

“Oh, I’m home. But I have to go away again tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“I have to go to this place. But I wanted to thank you for your nice letter. Father McFall brought it to the hospital. It really cheered me up.”

“Oh, it was nothing,” I said bitterly, recalling my forced effort with shame. Without thinking, I added, “This has been the worst summer of my life.”

“Same here,” said Brian without the least hint of irony, which made me feel horrible.

“How—how
are
you?” I was venturing just as Flora whisked into the kitchen to take the pineapple upside-down cake out of the oven. “It’s Brian,” I told her. “He’s out of the hospital.”

“Am I keeping you?” Brian asked.

“No, it’s just we have company for dinner.”

“Oh, sorry. I’ll get off.”

“No, I was already finished eating. Why are you going away tomorrow?”

“It’s this place where they work on you so you can get better. I’ll be going to school there, too.”

First Annie, now Brian. That left only Rachel, whose mother now hated me. It was while Brian was telling me that his mother was closing up their house and going with him that I realized he was talking in his old way, like before he had the speech lessons. The English accent was completely gone.

“Listen,” I said. “Can I call you back in the morning so we can really talk?”

“No, that’s okay, I just wanted to thank you for the letter. I’ll be going by ambulance first thing.”

“Ambulance?”

“It’s the most practical, for now. My mother will follow in the car. Listen, Helen, you be good. I guess we’ll see each other again sometime.”

When I returned to the dining room, the lamps were switched on and Flora was serving out the cake. The way she broke off whatever she had been telling Finn made me sure she had been filling him in on my recent losses—“First her grandmother dies, then her little friend Brian gets polio, and her little girlfriend has just moved away …”—but she must have been telling about my father’s polio, too, because as I came in Finn was murmuring that it was “no wonder, then, he was being extra strict, considering his own experience.”

“Well, how is Brian?” asked Flora, who had never even met him.

“He’s going away by ambulance tomorrow morning.” A huge slice of pineapple upside-down cake, which Flora knew was my favorite, awaited me on my plate.

“I thought you said he was home from the hospital.”

“He is but tomorrow he’s going off to this other place where they will
work on him
some more. He won’t even be coming back for school.”

“Probably one of those Sister Kenny places,” said Finn. “It’s an intense regimen but they get results, I’m told.”

“We’re very lucky it didn’t turn into an epidemic,” Flora prattled on. “Mrs. Jones said they’re going to go ahead with the fireworks on the Fourth. Though it’s so sad about that one little girl. Did Brian say anything about his legs, Helen?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. If he’s going there in an ambulance, they’re probably not in the best shape.” I knew I sounded rude, but it was better than crying. Brian had spoken to me the way
people do when they have already given up on you. I felt like giving up on myself. Flora always made sure I got a complete ring of pineapple in my serving of cake, and now its yellow eye glistened gelidly up at me: “Eat, little girl, and expand some more.”

When we were having coffee back in the living room, Finn took a small sketchbook and pencil from his jacket pocket and asked if he might draw the room to send to his American mum. “Grace would love this. She has this way she wants her rooms to look but she says it’s not the kind of look you can just go out and purchase.”

We sat on either side of him on the sofa and watched the agile pencil, which seemed like an extension of his hand, bring to life Nonie’s wing chair and the little painting above it, and then the eight-foot highboy looming in its shadowy corner, and then on to Nonie’s desk, which faced the window that used to have a view of the mountains. Finn evoked the highboy’s gloomy corner with hard, slanted lines that got closer together the darker he wanted the shadows. The branches that now obstructed the view he rendered with intricate wispy strokes. His shadows brought out the room’s spooky potential, and the erratic clutter of his branches made you feel the sadness of everything going to pieces around you. He commented as he drew: “What Grace wouldn’t give for that highboy. What a lovely little desk.”

“My father refinished that desk for my grandmother,” I said. “He likes working with wood a lot better than having to kowtow to faculty egos.”

Which really made Finn laugh.

“She wrote her letters at that desk,” Flora had to put in. “She wrote her letters to
me
at that desk.” She was about to call on her gift of tears when I shot her a murderous look and she pulled herself up short and offered instead, “Six years’ worth of
letters. Those letters from Mrs. Anstruther have become my guide for living, why, they have saved me from—”

Who knows what she would have blurted next if I hadn’t asked Finn where he had learned to draw like that.

“Oh, it was just this thing I started doing after I came to America. Bill liked me to draw scenes from Ireland. He had left as a baby and couldn’t remember anything. And I drew the men in my company, each with some personal military object, like his helmet hanging on the wall, so they could send home war portraits of themselves.”

“You can do people, too?” marveled Flora.

“Surely I can. Will I draw the two of you?” (That funny “will” of his again.) “How about the two of you sitting side by side on the sofa?”

“No, just draw Helen. She’ll like it better if I’m not in it,” Flora told him without the slightest hint of rancor. I can still hear her saying those words.

“Maybe I should sit over there in my grandmother’s chair,” I said.

“You get to know a person when you draw them,” Finn commented after he had laid in a few strokes, interspersed by quick glances. He scrutinized me the way he had the furniture. Sitting close beside him, Flora squeaked encouraging little
mmm
s, which seemed to be more about the drawing than about me. Once she said, “Oh!”

“What?” I said.

“He got that look of yours when you’re—”

“When I’m
what
?”

“Keep still,” Finn commanded.

“Can’t I even speak?”

“You can speak if you don’t change your expression or move your mouth.”

“
How
do you get to know a person when you draw them?”

“You catch some of their passing thoughts,” he said. “Now, do ye think you can keep your face still and just lift one hand out of your lap and lay it on the arm of the chair?”

“Which hand?”

“The right … no, I mean your left. So it’ll be the one on my right. Now unclench your fingers and let them hang loose over the edge of the chair, and would it be too much to ask you to lose the frown? Good girl.”

THE YOUNG EX-SOLDIER’S
pointy face, sharp nose elongated by the shadows of the lamp-lit room, made him look like a skinny magician growing out of a myth as he drew the frowning girl-child self-importantly arranged in her late grandmother’s wing chair. I made much of the shadows and the history of that shabby room in “Impediments,” the title story in a collection of stories about failed loves. In the story, the young man is awed to be in the house and he is trying to impress the young woman sitting beside him by drawing her grumpy little cousin. He is deeply attracted to the young woman, she is different from the usual pretty girl, she has a natural, unspoiled warmth and an endearing determination to make you feel appreciated. But the young woman goes away at the end of the summer and the soldier is left with his unrequited love. Yet this evening of lamplight and shadows in the arrogant, crumbling old house on top of a mountain will serve him all his life as a source of his art. It, more than any other source, is responsible for the elegiac, “lost,” overlay that
haunts his canvases and wins him fame and fortune. Years later, he sees a frowning woman sitting in a wing chair across a crowded room. She is balancing a glass of champagne rather primly on her lap and staring into a space that seems far from this room. The vision instantly fires up in him the old, trusted elegiac spark and he goes over to her and says, “I’d like to sketch you, just as you are, in that chair.” And she comes back from whatever faraway place she has been in and looks at him closely and says, “But you already have.” He thinks she is speaking symbolically or trying to charm him by being mysterious. But she lets him sketch her, just as she is, balancing her glass of champagne primly on her knees. Soon a crowd has gathered around the wing chair: who can resist the spectacle of a famous artist on one knee in front of a chair, sketching an unknown woman? He says, “You are a very good model. You keep still, but you don’t hide the flow of your thoughts.” She responds with a distant half smile. He signs the drawing and offers it to her, but she says, “No, keep it to remember me by,” and stands up, puts down her undrunk champagne, and walks out of the party. The reader knows that she has loved him since she was ten and has measured all men since then by his memory. But she has also, over the span of years, grown into her father’s cynicism and is hardened enough not to try for a belated romantic ending.