Perfect Reader (19 page)

We readily accepted that there were no perfect fathers or daughters or lovers. But we persisted in thinking history might give a writer in the fullness of time a perfect reader; or, on the other side, the scholar’s fantasy that he could understand, see, know a book, a poem, as all others had failed to see before. We saw so little, so wrongly, with the people in front of us, and yet with words on a page, we fooled ourselves that we could get it right. If Flora knew anyone, it was her parents. She had studied them in that academic way children learn their parents. She was the world’s living expert on her father. Ready with the footnotes, a thoroughly cross-referenced index: the boarding school years, the Yale years, the Rhodes years, the city interlude, and the Darwin recapitulation and coda. And yet, did such scrutiny and research make her his perfect reader? Looking closely did not mean seeing truly. In fact, it might mean reading wrongly—magnifying glasses distort—everything writ large. And then there was all she did not know, all he’d kept from her. How little she had factored in. She, his own daughter. Barely a footnote in his journal.

At the end of class, Flora waited till the last backpacks had floated out the door, then approached the professor, a nervousness in her stomach, as if she were a real student. “I wanted to introduce myself, or reintroduce myself,” she said. “I’m Flora Dempsey.”

“Of course you are!” Carpenter rocked back on his heels, pointing his chin upward, a wolf baying at the moon. “How lovely to see you. Pat mentioned you’d be sitting in on the class. You look very well.”

“Thank you.”

“I remember seeing you walking across the campus with your father when you were as tall as this desk,” he said, laying his hand upon the desk and leaning against it. He smiled at the memory, as if it were special. “Are you thinking of following in your father’s footsteps? Does academe lie lurking in your future?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Not for me. No, I don’t think so. The class just sounded interesting.”

“‘Interesting’? I don’t recall what you’ve been doing to keep yourself busy—you graduated more than a few years ago, if I’m not mistaken.”

“I’ve been working. In the city. At a magazine.”

“Ah, a journalist!” Everything he said implied an exclamation point.

“That’s rather a grandiose term for what I was. It was a magazine for the home and garden.”

“I’ve always admired the domestic arts,” Carpenter said. Was he trying to make her feel bad or better? “I’m a disastrous housekeeper myself. Can never find a thing.”

“It’s not really about housekeeping—the magazine,” Flora couldn’t help saying. “More about design, style, a holistic approach to living.”

“Of course.”

“But I’ve left my job, and I’m not sure what comes next. But no, no graduate school for me. I don’t think so.”

“You know, I was reading something about you.”

“About me? Or my father?”

“No, no, I did not misspeak. About you. Well, both of you. That he was working on a great new project before the end. And that you have been named his literary executor and hold the reins.” Carpenter had the faded eyes of the old, an eerily translucent liquid blue that lit up greedily as he announced this information. He was a beaming, radiant nemesis. “The scholarly world now awaits your next move!”

“Did Cynthia Reynolds say something to you?” She could see his interest stirred.

“No, I’ve not spoken about the matter with Ms. Reynolds.”

“Where did you say you read this?” Had Cynthia’s editor friend told someone?

“Some online journal, I think. Don’t look so surprised, my dear. I am well aware of the Internet, and perfectly capable of browsing the latest literary gossip. An odd verb choice—
browsing
. Suggests all research is basically shopping, no?”

“Did they mention what he was working on?”

“Well, Ms. Dempsey, I’m sure you know more about it than I. A far cry from your material at the magazine, hmm?”

The snobbery stung.

“They just said he was moving in a new direction,” Carpenter crowed. “I’d be curious to read Lewis Dempsey’s new material, certainly. Always intriguing when the critic is bold enough to face a jury of his peers.”

“I’m afraid I have to run. But I’m really so looking forward to this semester.” Flora gestured to the syllabus in her hand, speaking with exaggerated warmth, as one does when lying. She shook Carpenter’s hand, and escaped the cloister of the classroom. She ran across the quad to the Cross Library. At the computer, she typed “Flora Dempsey poems publication,” feeling self-conscious, as one does when researching oneself—the feeling not unlike that of being caught in the act of examining one’s own reflection. Nothing. She tried “Lewis Dempsey poems” and “Lewis Dempsey literary executor” and “Dempsey Darwin death poetry.” A photograph of her father from his inauguration appeared and with it an archived article from Darwin’s alumni magazine that described a small child—her—running out and hugging her father as he led the processional into the gymnasium. She hadn’t remembered doing that. But she could not find the story of his new material, of literary anticipation. Was it possible Carpenter had invented it? But then, how would he know of the new project in the first place?

Another story came to her—one her father had told her about Sidney Carpenter. He’d been so disgruntled with the college a few years back that he’d become a Deep Throat for
The Darwin Witness
, the student newspaper, leaking bits of administrative gossip to the reporters, enumerating the excruciating minutiae of the endless faculty meetings, telling them who exactly had been the dissenting vote at some beloved associate professor’s tenure decision. How had a man who so loved words, a man so enamored of the subject of his work, come to feel such an equally exquisite loathing for the institution that supported his devotion? What was wrong with this place—this corrosive, embittering bastion of enlightenment?

Flora counted and dreaded down the days to fourth grade. The counting made it come quicker, and the dread. School resuming—the ostensible, official return to normal life. But Georgia would not be there. Georgia was home from the hospital but still in bed. Flora pictured her in her purple room plastered into a full-body cast covered in marker—loving notes of encouragement, none from her. Almost everyone from school had visited Georgia—everyone but Flora. The class made her a giant “Get Well Soon” card, and while the other girls scrawled how terribly they missed her, Flora simply signed her name, “FLORA,” as if they hardly knew each other.

Flora loved her new teacher, Kate, who was slow to smile, but when she did, when you made her, it made you feel important. Flora’s life was thickly populated by adults now—Kate, her mother, and occasionally her father, Betsy, who picked her up from school some days and brought her back to her mother’s house, and Dr. Berry. Even Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson—in class they were studying poetry—were grown-ups, and the author of that year’s play, too, Shakespeare. The play was
Macbeth
, or at least
Macbeth
’’ greatest hits: the witches boiling and toiling, Lady Macbeth out, outing, and Flora, as Macbeth himself, performing the soliloquy of “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Was Kate being nice to her in assigning her the role, or trying to keep her busy, or was the consensus that she, of all the nine-year-olds, could most relate to the material? Of course you couldn’t call it
Macbeth
anywhere near the stage. You called it “the Scottish play.” If you called it
Macbeth
, bad things might happen. Everyone was very strict about it, especially Sarah Feldman, the tallest, prissiest girl in their grade.

“It doesn’t work that way. A word can’t control the universe,” Flora told her.

“Just don’t say it, okay?” Sarah said, as though trying to be patient.

There was no Georgia, but there was a new student in Flora’s class, a boy named Ezekiel. No nicknames, only Ezekiel. He was the only black student in their class of eighteen. He was not as smart as Georgia, but then, no one was. But he was very smart and had lived in England and, before that, Nigeria, and he had a wonderful accent that made everything sound surprising. He played Banquo, and Banquo’s ghost, to Flora’s Macbeth.

In the evenings, her mother helped her memorize her lines, Flora reading them again and again and again, and then reciting them as her mother, patiently at first, then less so, read along. “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.” Why was death dusty? Flora didn’t like that part. “Do I have to say that?” she asked.

“Yes,” her mother said. “That’s the whole point. He wrote it, you speak it. You don’t get to write it, too.”

“I don’t think I want to be an actress,” Flora observed. Though she still liked sneaking through her mother’s things, and trying on her life. She still liked spying in other people’s windows, and drawers, though now she did it alone. But she drew the line at other people’s words.

At the performance, Flora tried not to look at her father, but it was impossible not to look at him. He had come in as the show was beginning and stood off to the side, leaning against the wall in his tan suit, his tie off. She thought she could see his eyes watering; he looked the way he did when he listened to music he loved. When she got through to the end of the soliloquy without making a mistake, he let out a strong “Yes” and clapped, loudly and slowly, and then Flora’s eyes watered, too.

“Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth,”
she whispered as she walked offstage.

No one in school said an unkind word to Flora. The girls in her class simply withdrew from her and banded together around Sarah Feldman. They seemed to like one another more than they once had. Mistrust of Flora united them. Over lunch, they talked loudly about Georgia, how brave she was, how she itched under her cast, how they loved to feed her gerbils for her. One day, they all came to school wearing skirts, a perfectly synchronized fashion attack, Flora the only girl in shorts. Flora noticed but hoped no one else would—acknowledgment worse than the thing itself. But Kate did notice, and she pulled Flora aside and apologized. She said she’d talked to the girls about excluding people, and it wouldn’t happen again. Flora wondered if they’d been sent to the headmaster, as she and Georgia had, if many girls had faced what had once been their groundbreaking punishment.

“It doesn’t matter,” Flora told Kate, though she cried to her mother that night and begged her to let them move. Her mother had hated Darwin before, and now she refused to leave. But from then on, she referred to Sarah Feldman as “that little bitch.”

The next day, Flora went to school with safety pins in the holes in her ears, where earrings used to be. She looked like her mom with purple hair. Her ears said other people didn’t matter. At lunch, Kate pulled her aside again and asked her to take them out.

“They look like you’re trying to hurt yourself,” she said.

“I’m not,” Flora said. “They don’t hurt at all.”

Ezekiel did not try to befriend Flora, though they were the only two to sit alone at lunch. He seemed not to need friends, and this made Flora want to know him more. How did one do that, not need company? Flora watched him and he didn’t notice her. Like Flora in the beginning, he had a hard time calling the teachers by their first names. Instead, he called them “Excuse me.” His posture was impeccable, his neck a foot long. Every day he wore a knit vest over a pressed white shirt, as though the school had a uniform, which it didn’t, which was one of the best things about the school.

“Why do you dress like that?” she asked him. “You don’t have to, you know. T-shirts are fine here.”

He didn’t answer, denying her even his accent.

Flora asked him, “Which do you like better, Africa or England?”

He was silent, and Flora couldn’t tell if he was thinking or ignoring her.

“I’ve been to England,” she told him, because her family had once, a few summers back, gone to London and stayed in a flat where the living room walls were painted black, which her mother found lugubrious, Flora glamorous. Her father had taken her to Laura Ashley immediately upon their arrival from the airport to buy a white petticoated dress with a scarlet pinafore; the perfect outfit, what Laura Ingalls would call her “Sunday best,” her “finery,” as her father called it. “I like the punks on the King’s Road,” she said.

Ezekiel said, “Africa is a continent. England is a country. You can’t compare them.”

“I know that,” she snapped. They hadn’t studied Africa yet—that was fifth grade—but she wasn’t an idiot. “I’m not asking you to compare them. I’m asking for your opinion, which you like more.”

But he had no opinions, or none he was willing to share.

Finally, one day weeks into school, she trapped him in the cargo net at recess and asked what she’d wanted to ask, what she’d suspected all along. “Was your family happier before you moved here, before you came to Darwin?”

“No,” he said without a glimmer of doubt. “We are happier now. We are very lucky to live in Darwin. Darwin is an ideal place to grow up.”

That finished Ezekiel for Flora. There was nothing she could learn from him.