Flora (29 page)

“I am,” he said, not appearing to note this infantile greeting. “Kindly lent by Mr. Crump, but it has to be returned to him within the hour. Ah, Mrs. Jones.” He stepped over to the sink, where she was washing up, and offered his hand. “Devlin Finn. I didn’t introduce myself very well last time.”

“Oh, Mr. Finn,” she said. “My hands are all wet.”

He waited while she dried them to her standards on her apron and then clasped them firmly between his, which I could see flustered her a little. “How is everyone doing up here?” he asked in a confidential voice, as though he and she were by themselves.

“It was a shock, Mr. Finn, but we’re managing. Is there anything I could get you? A glass of water?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Jones, but all I need is Helen here. I’ve come to pack up Flora’s belongings to take with me on the train to Birmingham. It leaves in a little over an hour and I’m going to need her help.”

It was the first time anyone had said her name.

I LED THE
way upstairs, past Starling Peake without saying anything about whose room I hoped it would be, and on down the hall to the Willow Fanning room. There were important questions I was aching to ask, but something about Finn’s countenance held me back. If this had been in a fairy tale, a magician might had encased Finn in a lifelike mask and said, “You are safe behind this mask unless someone says something that can crack it. You need to guard against this happening or you’ll be destroyed.” I must have wanted Finn not to be destroyed more than I craved to have the answers to things only he could tell me because I held back, though it was very hard.

There was the old carpetbag in which she had carried the filled mason jars, Uncle Sam’s apple-cured ham, and her special flour (“I never go anywhere anymore without my self-rising flour …”), and there was the suitcase that, aside from underwear and some sanitary napkins discreetly concealed in hand-sewn
wrappers, had contained the sack of cornmeal, tea bags, a cake in a tin box, and the wax paper parcels of Juliet Parker’s herbs.

Without the food, all the clothes that had arrived later in the box fitted easily into the suitcase. We did the closet first, and Finn showed me how to fold blouses in three parts, Army-style.

“You remember, Helen, that day on the walk, when we were telling our family histories, and I said I had a brother?”

“Yes.”

“And you asked me whether he was jealous when I got to go to America, and I cut you short.”

“You said, ‘That’s another story,’ and that it was enough about you.”

“What a memory you have! Well, now I want to tell you about Conan. When he was fourteen, Bill and Grace, my adoptive parents, invited him to come to Albany for a long visit. I was sixteen by then and had been with them for six years. Things weren’t good back in Ireland, my father was ill and unlikely to work again, and it was sort of assumed by all in an unsaid way that if Conan wanted to stay on with us in America he could. Well, he was over the moon with joy. Now I’ll get to the sad part quickly because there’s no use drawing it out. A week before he was to sail, he went into town to buy presents for us, and he was gunned down on the street.”

“You mean he was killed?”

“Shot right through the heart.”

“But why?”

“Because Ireland’s just that way now. It’s like your Civil War, only the two sides don’t wear uniforms and fight out in the open. They mistook him for another man’s red-haired son. All of us were heartbroken, but then as time went on I became sure I was the one responsible for his death.”

“How could you be?”

“Ah, because I had written letters praising everything, bragging about my good fortune, making him want my life.”

“But that doesn’t make you responsible—”

“Don’t rush me, darling. It doesn’t, but I
felt
that it did. Then the war started and I joined up and things got better until I lost my friend Barney, or until his mother came to see me and said she wished her son had been clever enough to get out when I had. After that, the two sorrows linked up—or, no, a better way to put it is that the weight of Barney’s death piled on top of Conan’s death made me feel so unworthy I didn’t want to live. Of course I didn’t understand the mechanics of all this going on inside me until the mind doctors explained it after my little failed attempt to extinguish myself. Now you’re wondering why I’m telling you this story, I can see it all over your face, Helen.”

“Why are you?”

“Because it may be useful to you if ever you start feeling that something bad that happened is all your fault. Fate is far more complicated than that, and thinking you’re in charge of it is egotistical and will only make you sick and waste your life. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes.”

“Now, where are the rest of her things?”

“There’s just what’s in those drawers.”

I had been dreading the drawers because I hadn’t decided what to do about the top one. I wanted to keep Nonie’s letters, but I also wanted Finn to respect me and I hadn’t figured a way to achieve both things. So I started with the bottom two drawers, leaving the top for last. Her stockings and lingerie and the hand-sewn wrappers in which she stored her sanitary pads. She
hadn’t used up the second supply, which had come with her box of clothes. I was pleased with my tactfulness as I took charge of these very personal items, tucking them away in the suitcase with my own hands so he wouldn’t have to touch them and be embarrassed.

Finn glanced at his watch. It could no longer be postponed, the top drawer. But it was not as I had last seen it. On the left was Juliet Parker’s faithful stack of summer letters, but on the other side, where Nonie’s letters had been, was a package done up in gift paper I recognized from the stash of old wrappings from Nonie’s deep desk drawer. My first thought was that if Flora had gone snooping in our drawers, even in the interest of wrapping a present for me, then it sort of equaled out my intrusions into hers.

“These are letters from Juliet Parker.” I handed over the stack to Finn. “She wrote every single week.” I still couldn’t say Flora’s name aloud. “This other … I don’t know.” For me to say
there used to be another pile of letters in here
would be to admit I’d been snooping.

“It looks like a present,” Finn said.

“I know, but—”

“It might be for you. For your birthday.”

“But there’s no card.”

“Well, maybe there was no time for a card. Why don’t you open it?”

“I don’t —If you think it’s all right.”

“I know it’s all right,” he said, making a noble effort not to be caught looking at his watch again.

Inside were Nonie’s letters, all done up neat and tight in their ribbon. The folded note inside said,

Dear Helen, I hand these over to you, on your eleventh birthday. May they sustain and guide you as they have me. There are some personal parts, but I didn’t want to black things out like in those censored letters from soldiers overseas. It would seem an insult to her. I will miss these precious letters but you have taught me so many things I’m grateful for, which I will try to incorporate into my life and my teaching.

Love from your admiring cousin, Flora Waring.

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t look at him. It seemed I also was encased in a mask that one wrong word or move could crack. “Did you know about this?”

“I did. We talked it over. She said you had asked to read them, but she was worried some parts were too old for you. Then she thought about it some more and decided you would grow into them. She said she wanted to give you something you’d treasure and the letters were the best thing she had.”

XXX.

I think of Mrs. Jones, who was seventy that summer, driving after dark by herself to stand among the crowd gathered at the lake and say aloud, “Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten,” every time a pretty firework went up in the sky. Beryl Jones didn’t even know Stella Reeve, the little girl who had caught polio at the lake and died a few days later. She had only read about her in the newspaper, but she did it because her dear dead Rosemary, who in life had loved to make little memorial ceremonies, had suggested it.

I spent all those days and nights with Flora the summer I was ten and she was twenty-two: three weeks of June, all of July, and the first six days of August. I thought I knew all there was to know about her, but she has since become one of my profoundest teachers, though she never got to stand in front of a real class and teach.

These pages are for her. They are my attempt to stand among the crowd and say aloud for all to hear, “Flora Waring, you are not forgotten.”

“I came across this sentence I wanted to run by you,” my father said. This was back in the seventies. We were talking on
the phone. There had been years when we didn’t talk, but now we had started again. “Here it is. I wrote it down for the next time you took it into your head to honor me with a call: ‘Suppose love were to evolve as rapidly in our brains as technical skill has done.’ What do you make of that?”

“Where is it from?”

“
A Burnt-Out Case
. Dr. Colin, the leprosy doctor, is talking to Querry, the burnt-out architect. The doctor is still opting for evolutionary progress in spite of all the terrible things men have done to one another in the first half of our century.”

“You were reading that
again
?” I was playing for time while I tried to work out what I thought about the sentence.

“Greene satisfies my perennial cynicism. But that little nugget of hope stuck out like a thorn this time around. What do you make of it? Is such a supposition likely?”

“Not in my lifetime,” I said, sensing his relief and approval through the receiver. “Certainly not in yours,” I generously added.

“Nope. I consider myself lucky to have gotten off with just an eye for eighty thousand and one lives. Well, just thought I’d run it past you.”

We both knew who was meant by the one life added to the final Hiroshima death count.

(“I had planned to leave Oak Ridge the next morning, the morning of your birthday, but then we got the news of the bomb. I went back to my room to leave Harker a note, since he might not have heard due to his deafness, but he had cleared out and left
me
a note. It said, ‘Fucking hell, Harry, this went too far, there will be retribution.’ When I got back to the site, half my crew had left and those who had remained were exhibiting the usual unsavory aspects of human nature. One announced that
God had informed him about the bomb a week ago, but he had been under divine orders not to tell. Several of them petitioned for immediate jeopardy bonuses in case the whole place blew sky-high. One enterprising rogue was collecting bets on how many Japs had been killed and when the war would be over. And then there was the usual quota of worthy fellows cutting their eyes at you for approval: well, here I am, sir, ready to get on with the job, some of us have to be responsible around here. I realized I was more than a little unhinged and decided to leave at once, drive over the mountain before nightfall, and get out of this madness. I hadn’t touched a drop on the premises, but I was looking forward to driving up to the house and surprising you and Flora and then pouring myself a well-earned glass, or maybe more than one. I was
thinking
about that drink, in fact it was the last thing I can remember thinking about before I rounded the curve. It was dark as hell and then something flew out at me like a ghost. I turned the wheel as hard as I could to miss it, but I obviously didn’t succeed.”)

My father took a long time to recover from the accident. He “sustained,” as the jargon goes, a punctured lung, five cracked ribs, a broken femur (the polio leg), and the loss of his left eye. He referred to the eye almost cavalierly, especially in the old Hammurabi sense of an eye for an eye, and wore a black patch over it, but rarely mentioned the tragicomic dragging lurch, increasingly compounded by arthritis, that became his normal gait. He took even longer to emerge from a severe darkness of spirit in which he seemed to turn his unsparing disgust for human foibles completely against himself. (“Didn’t I tell you they’d find themselves a prince of an assistant principal, a young war hero and social scion with a good word for everybody and willing to coach the track team free of charge while one-eyed,
gimpy, bad-assed old Harry takes his perpetual leave of absence?”)

His unlikely redeemer was the Old Mongrel himself, who took him out for long drives, settled his hospital bills, paid for us to have the Huffs’ cook (Lorena and Rachel had vanished into thin air the day after the bombing of Nagasaki, leaving a house that turned out to be rented and furniture that was leased, and without paying anyone except the manly riding teacher, who wisely got her fees in advance. They left behind a swath of delectable rumors, the prevalent one being that they were German spies. I think Annie Rickets’s speculations may have been closer to home: there was no Mr. Huff. Tall stories told by a woman of imagination and some ready cash who moves to town with her child are more easily swallowed in wartime.)

My father went into business with Earl Quarles, much to my amazement and disgust, and the two of them prospered in the postwar housing boom. When I was twelve I was sent to boarding school and became a little snob who vacationed with new friends and went home as seldom as possible—then on to college, followed by a breakdown and lengthy stay in an expensive institution, where I began writing, for therapy, but also out of disdain and boredom, a sort of elegiac tale about the Recoverers and the house my father and the Old Mongrel had torn down to build more of their mountain-view “estates.” Many reconstructions later, it was published as my first novel,
House of Clouds
.

When the Old Mongrel died in his upper nineties, my father demanded that I get on a plane and show myself at the funeral. Driving me back to the airport afterward, he dropped his bomb.

“Well, dammit, Helen, it was your doing.”

“
My
doing!”

“You were the one who told him I was the age of the century. And quoted the old doctor’s poem about the ‘cloud-begirded’ December day I was born. All he had to do was go look up the birth records at city hall and count back to his stepsister running away in May. It was there in front of our eyes, but none of us saw it—or wanted to see it. You might as well get used to having his genes. I have. It’s made sense of a lot of things for me. He was a crude, wily old rascal, a raw slice of genuine Americana, and that’s not the end of the world. For me, it was the beginning in many ways.”