Perfect Reader (26 page)

She had not lost her nerve when she was intercepted at the door to the English Department by Pat Jenkins. Was Pat perpetually disapproving, or was it only Flora, imperfect daughter of a perfect gentleman, of whom she disapproved?

“Everything all right, Flora?” she asked. “We don’t usually see you here on Mondays.” Had she seen the article? Her worst thoughts confirmed? Was Flora now barred from the premises?

“I’m fine, thanks,” Flora said. “And you?”

“Can I do something for you?”

“I was just going to leave this for Professor Carpenter.”

“I’ll give it to him.” Pat held out her hand and took the letter. She gave Larks a perfunctory cuddle and they were dismissed. “Nice to see you both,” she said.

Flora walked quickly back. She was not wanted on campus, nor did she want to be there. She was done with Darwin College. What was it to her? Her father’s employer; her family’s former landlord; the setting of her childhood. A collective of disappointed people burying themselves under ideas. Who
privileged
(their word) thought above all else. Ambitious thinkers, grasping, striving, while trying to look contemplative, nonchalant, and depressed. And reading, reading, reading. Infinite reading. Always ready with the right reference, the counterargument, the dazzling associative leap. They had what looked to the rest of the world like the most outrageous gig—you barely had to be there; you were an expert; you walked to work. And yet there was something wrong with all of them. Cynthia the only contented academic Flora had ever met.

It was like the last day of school. She almost ran. She almost sang.

“Larks!” she yelled as they approached the tennis courts. “Find a ball.” And Larks ran off into the bushes, on assignment, and emerged in seconds yellow-mouthed.

Flora’s throwing arm had grown stronger, her technique smoother. She still could not throw as far as her father, but she had improved. She threw till Larks’s pink tongue hung as though pulled by weights. “Quite enough of that,” she called, and they headed toward home.

Back in her old room, she pulled out from the closet the solitary box of adolescent stuff, the physical past: the black leggings with the lace bottoms, the plastic charm necklace and the bright gummy bracelets, the marblelized glass pipe in its quilted pouch, the assortment of mix tapes arranged by former friends and boyfriends—people she no longer knew. How she’d loved those objects; how unmistakably hers they’d once been. Unlike the relics of her father’s former life, none of hers were made from words. She’d never kept a journal. She’d tossed the old letters, the school essays. She grabbed a tape Esther Moon had made their junior year. On one side it read “The Wild Side”; on the other, “The Mild Side.” Her father still had a cassette player in his stereo in the study—the one place on earth the tape deck was not yet obsolete.

Flora put in “The Wild Side.” The first song: Led Zeppelin, “D’yer Mak’er.” “When I read the letter you wrote me …” She played it loud. It had been a while. She started dancing, and she remembered dancing, alone in one of her rooms, getting ready to go out. Alone, but with the promise of change. She danced like hell. She swayed and twisted. Darwin knew. The secret was shared. His words a little less hers, his life a little more theirs.

The beginning of the end of school came with Georgia’s return. Flora had thought that when Georgia returned to school, life would slowly go back to normal. Georgia would be well, and they would be friends again—how could they not be? They were
FLORA
and
GEORGIA,
like sisters. They were Flo-Geo, like the sprinter. Though Georgia would not be sprinting anytime soon. She was still on crutches, one of her legs locked in a massive cast, heavy as a safe, and graffitied with other girls’ pastel words. Those other girls took turns carrying things for her—her backpack, her notebooks, her lunch—as though it were an honor, a compliment paid them. Flora tried not to think of the two of them playing Pollyanna, of Georgia the soothing nurse pushing Flora the plucky cripple through the long halls of the President’s House in her father’s leather desk chair. She tried not to remember any of it.

Georgia’s first day back, Flora waited. She would let Georgia come to her. Georgia hadn’t wanted to see her, but when she did see her, it would be okay. They would apologize and forgive each other. Or they would talk about other subjects. There was so much to talk about. Maybe Georgia had finished reading the encyclopedia while she was at home. Maybe she was even smarter, and knew all there was to know about xylophones and zebras.

And at lunch, while Flora ate alone, Georgia did come up to her, as Sarah Feldman whispered ferociously with the other girls.

“Hi,” Georgia said. She stood above Flora, leaning on her crutches. Georgia’s face looked the same, her cheeks and hair the same, but she was not the same. She had always seemed more grown-up, without being older; now she seemed older, too.

“Hi.” Flora wondered if she should get up, or help Georgia down, but she sat still, as though paralyzed, her peanut butter and jelly sandwich hovering stupidly in her hand. “How is your leg?” Flora asked. “Does it hurt?”

“They say I might never recover the full use of it,” Georgia said, doctor-like.

“Oh,” Flora said, trying not to cry. “Otherwise are you okay?”

Georgia looked away. “I had three surgeries, Flora.”

“But you’re okay now. You look okay.”

Georgia tried to stand up straighter, but she couldn’t.

“Are you free sometime this week?” Flora asked. “We could do something.”

“No,” Georgia said.

“You’re not free?”

“No.”

“Maybe later, next week?” Flora said.

“I don’t know,” Georgia said. “I might have plans. With Sarah.”

“I thought you said she was a priss,” Flora said.

“That was before. She’s a really good friend.”

Flora hadn’t known Georgia could be mean. Was that somehow Flora’s fault, Georgia’s meanness? It was like they were strangers–strangers who once spent every day together, and talked about everything. For months, Flora had been trying to imagine what life would be like if she hadn’t moved to Darwin, how the world might look different, and better, and still it was crushing that Georgia had been imagining the same thing. If she could undo the last year, she would. It was an easy choice, a nonchoice. No Flora.

Flora said nothing, but she was crying now, not out of sadness, but fury. Georgia wasn’t the only one whom bad things had happened to. What about all that had happened to Flora? Had Georgia forgotten about that? Flora stood, dropping her lunch. She wanted to push Georgia, to shake her, to steal her crutches and run away.

“Good-bye, Flora,” Georgia said. She looked a little nervous, as though she knew Flora’s thoughts. “Good luck with everything,” she said, as if she were a cruel adult.

And Flora walked away, away from Georgia and the rest of the school, down the driveway, and no one came after her, even as she walked all the way to her mother’s house. Her mother was at home, and she ran to Flora and caught her in her arms when she walked in the door, and this time she didn’t have to turn right around and go back, but instead her mother called the school and explained that she had picked Flora up, that Flora wasn’t feeling well, and with her mother’s permission, Flora started not feeling well once a week, hooky from school becoming as reliable a routine as the Ponzu dinners had once been. But this routine she did not share with her father. Another secret, another silence. She knew he wouldn’t approve, so she never told him. School, after all, was his business.

20

Number One Criminal

T
HE NEXT DAY,
The Daily Darwin Gazette
, the slightly more grown-up paper in town, had joined the conversation on the lately discovered late Dempsey poems, the letters and editorial pages devoting themselves to the pitiably contemptible figure of Flora Dempsey, Literary Executioner. In a town where salamander fatalities and white bread were cause for alarm, clearly there was a shortage of news.

“I see you’re none too popular these days,” Gus teased her when she went in with Larks to buy the
Gazette
and milk that morning. “I do love to see the Darwinians tie themselves in knots over some sonnet. Endless books about other books—did Shakespeare write those plays or did he not? That kills me. Can’t they leave the poor guy alone?

“The old man would be proud,” Gus went on. “He took a kind of pride in his enemies, didn’t he? Maybe a little too much pride.” That was a new perspective: Her father would be proud. “‘I’m going to take a lot of people down with me, Gus,’ he liked to say. You know. One of those funny lines of his.”

Flora hurried from the store. It was the second time she’d made the Darwin news, and though the first time, her parents had tried to conceal it from her, she had seen the photos of the fire escape, the headlines warning citizens of dempsey’s daughter’s dangerous games. This time around, the commentators thoughtfully wondered whether Flora was “fighting the patriarchal establishment of conventional modes of publication,” and suggested “the work be released into a ‘creative commons’ where it could be shared—altered, even—by all Lewis Dempsey’s literary admirers.” Another argued she, “like the burgeoning movement of evangelicals in town, stood to poison their community of openness and tolerance with the arsenic of artistic censorship.” A third psychologized that “with her troubled childhood,” it should come as no surprise “that she is not a capable steward of her father’s legacy.” Others speculated on the legacy itself: Dempsey had written an epic, a modern-day
Iliad
, or an homage to Thomas Hardy in verse.

Who were these people, these experts? Her mother’s line had been that they hadn’t suffered enough, but maybe it was the opposite; maybe their petty obsessions were a balm for their daily suffering. Flora had stopped on the common to read about herself, the slanderous paper spread awkwardly on the grass before her, Larks moaning with stoical patience, and when Flora finally looked up, she saw Paul Davies leaving his office. Was he coming toward her? She did not want to find out. She did not want to be scolded, or asked to apologize. She folded the paper messily and pulled Larks back toward home. Larks stared, unbudging, in a state of disbelief—first gratuitous outdoor paper reading, and now they were not going on their full walk around the campus?

“Not today,” she said. “If you have a complaint, Larks, you’ll have to get in line. The complaints department is closed.”

At the house, an envelope had been slid beneath the door. Flora paused before bending to pick it up. A death threat from some Darwinian crazy? A petition to release the poems? But then she recognized Carpenter’s twirling handwriting from his chalkboard notes. She opened it and read:

Dear Ms. Dempsey,

It was with great regret that I read your letter of March 21, regarding the article in
The Darwin Witness
and your withdrawal from Modern Poetry. Though I don’t in the least begrudge you your assumptions, I would like to take this opportunity to clear the air, if I may.

My rivalry with your father—if one can call it that—is no source of pride for me, nor have I any interest in pursuing it into the grave. Nor do I in any way extend some ancient ill will to you, his daughter. I have, in fact, enjoyed getting to know you and having your thoughtful presence in my class this semester. That said, your father and I were not friends, and often over the years mere collegiality proved too much for us to muster. But I have never doubted or denied that your father’s fine scholarship was, in the course of his career, a tremendous asset to our Darwin community.

As I mentioned to you once, our first encounters were quite pleasant, and we even exchanged drafts of our respective writing in those days—an early version of the first few chapters of what would come to be
Reader as Understander
, and a project I was working on on Yeats, which remains to this day largely unpublished. Though I saw great promise in his book, he rightly saw very little of merit in mine, and our exchanges of material at that point ceased.

As to how our little newspaper may have learned the story of your father’s latest work, I would only say to you, Ms. Dempsey, that this is Darwin! If we tried to account for all the wrongs done us, we’d have time for little else. I do wish you the best, and hope our paths may cross again one day, if not as friends, then at least as friendly acquaintances.

With kind regards, Sidney Carpenter

So that was it. Far from being a perfect reader, her father had been unkind, a destructive reader for Sidney Carpenter. His meanness the start of the troubles between them. It was possible Carpenter was deceiving her, but it seemed unlikely he would invent a story so disparaging of his own work. It was moving, Carpenter’s humility—“he rightly saw very little of merit in mine.” Had her father been explicit in his contempt for Carpenter’s reading of Yeats, or had it merely been implied in that way intelligent people fool themselves into thinking their transparency is opaque to others less savvy? Had he convinced himself he was doing his rival a favor, preventing the premature publication of such blatantly flawed work?

But if Carpenter was not the
Witness
Deep Throat, who was? Cynthia, as Madeleine suspected? It was so sleazy and desperate, so malicious, leaking a story to a college newspaper, and Cynthia, for all her aggravating enthusiasms and relentless campaigning, had seemed to bear no malice. Perhaps Flora had read her wrong. Or maybe Cynthia was still deranged with grief, still suffering from whatever had compelled her to break into the house and steal her lover’s toothbrush that first night. The publication of the poems would be one way to keep Lewis Dempsey alive. There would be readings; there would be discourse! Maybe, in Cynthia’s mind, Flora was killing him all over again, or at least insisting he stay dead. Malice, then, would be commensurate with the crime.

Flora would not sit around awaiting the next batch of accusations. Larks was right in bemoaning his indoorness. It was the perfect day for a bike ride: new, breezy, ice blue. She needed to be more active, to take action. Such eagerness, such suddenness was not mania—it was health. First, though, she would need to break into the basement of Paul’s apartment building in town to reclaim the old Peugeot—surprisingly easy, it turned out. The building manager even helped her carry the bicycle up the stairs when she assured him it was hers. She looked so innocent, Flora-Girl. She was the perfect thief.

From Paul’s, she headed toward campus. She passed the President’s House and the well-groomed, well-watered Darwin grounds, and the little house she’d shared with her mother, and her old elementary school. She was moving distinctly in the direction of Cynthia’s house. It would be good to talk to Cynthia. Cynthia—the snitch, the anonymous source. Flora needed answers. But Cynthia wasn’t home, and she wasn’t in the garden, either, Flora discovered after walking around the back of the house. She’d expected something more exuberant, more verdant, and less weeded, and though it was early in the season and the garden might yet spring to life, perhaps she was observing here some significant neglect, evidence Cynthia was depressed or unwell. Had the woman completely lost her mind? Was that the reason behind the betrayal?

The house—small and white, with green-black shutters—wasn’t the right house for her. The windows too small, like piggy eyes. And Cynthia was right, it was dark inside, the day’s brightness held at bay, Flora observed as she pushed open the back door, which brought her directly into the collage of Cynthia’s living room. No locked doors in Darwin. Darwin was perfectly safe. Flora herself the number one criminal.

“Cynthia?” she called out. “Hello?”

The house was empty but for Andy and Pablo. They appeared at the door, circling her, tails at attention. There was something reptilian in their silent slinking.

“Hello, strange cats,” Flora said. As she shut the door behind her, the fear nagged of being caught, quite different from the sense of doing wrong. After all, she just wanted to look around. And Cynthia had stolen her father’s papers, broken into his house on the day of his death, taken the early drafts and kept them from her for many months. Cynthia had rushed her. Cynthia had said to the Darwin College Woodstein who broke the story, “It’s sad, really. Those poems are the only hold she has on her father.” Without Cynthia, no poems—her father’s chiding inscription. No poems, no transformation to harpy in the local press.

When she’d come for Thanksgiving, Flora had been unable to see the areas of interest—the upstairs. It was a rabbit warren of little rooms. There were three doors off a small hall—one to a bathroom, one to a guest room, and one to Cynthia’s bedroom. Her bed was covered by a beautiful antique quilt, the pattern slightly irregular. It was unusual to see things authentically old today—people bought new distressed wood, or denim, the artful appearance of age an added feature like any other, as though time could be contrived in that way, made up on the spot. But Cynthia, like any good WASP with good taste, seemed to have curated her rooms with irreplaceable old objects. Things with stories, and pedigrees. There was a glass of water and a water pitcher by the bed, of the kind of thick glass that distorts, and a stack of books on the side table, which was really a small turquoise chest, the paint chipping to reveal other incarnations below. A new biography of Thomas Hardy, bookmarked, triumphed atop the stack.

In the closet, every color was accounted for, every shoe sensible and heel-less. In the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, a migraine medicine Flora’s mother also took. On the wall above the tub, framed pinups from old magazines—of course—and on the sink a red-and-white china pitcher from which fat makeup brushes burst forth, bouquetlike. Under the sink, a basket of pink rollers, of the sort you saw little old ladies walking around in, in the city, doing errands. Flora’s grandmother, too, had curled and smoothed the front of her hair with one giant pink roller every morning of her life.

In the guest room, there was a small bookshelf filled with children’s books with worn spines, their bold covers faded by the sun or years. Had Cynthia bought them in anticipation of a visit from a friend’s child? Or was this where the nieces and nephews stayed? Surely, as one of five siblings, she had many of those. On the top shelf, next to the pea green of
The Secret Garden
, were the
Little House
books, with their yellow covers—nine paperbacks fit snugly into their cardboard case. Flora slid them out, one after another, and flipped through the pages. They were ghosts, the books of one’s youth.

She remembered it was back downstairs, past the bathroom, where Cynthia had disappeared so eagerly that night and returned with the manuscript clutched in her arms like some found chunk of Rosetta stone. And indeed, there Flora found the tiny study, filled with grown-up, scholarly books, the tall art books down on the lower shelves, the books losing height as the shelves gained it. On the desk, a dictionary on a wooden pedestal, opened to the
M
’’. The desk was an old sewing table converted now to allow for different sorts of women’s work. There were no drawers, everything on display. Nestled into a neat bundle beside the original manuscript were two letters her father had written. Flora fingered them, though she knew better now: She had learned the punishing lesson of reading his most private words. Beneath those was a watercolor he had made, with Cynthia depicted as a cat planting bulbs in the garden, himself a Larks-like dog watching her from the hammock, over the top of his book. So he had evolved over the years from mouse to dog, but the women of his life were all hopelessly feline? Her mother, and Cynthia, and Flora, too, symbolically interchangeable?

One of the real cats—Pablo or Andy, she couldn’t tell which—jumped up onto the table next to her, startling her. Was that a car door she heard? She’d stayed too long. She stacked the letters and watercolor more or less as they had been, then picked up the manuscript with its twilight blue inscription and headed toward the back door. She could slip out there, but stupidly she’d left her bike out front by the driveway. What if someone had seen it? And as she placed the poems into the straw basket of her bicycle, she noticed Cynthia’s neighbor noticing her from inside the open garage. Flora waved, as waving was the done thing, and pedaled away.

But as she rode down Cynthia’s quiet residential street toward town, the wind picked up, lifting her hair, and first one and then two pages of the manuscript. Three from the end blew off in quick succession. Flora stopped and hurried after them. Another flew away. She chased her father’s papers through a meadow by the side of the road. Like a kid chasing butterflies, but clumsier, and less cheerful.