The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross (10 page)

“I quite agree,” Kate said. “There is only the present.”

“Thank God,” Flavia said, holding out her glass. “Someone who understands.”

“Which is not to say,” Kate said, handing it back to her refilled, “that I necessarily agree with your view of your present. I might agree, but I need to be persuaded. Try me.”

“I started talking to people about giving away my money, for scholarships, guaranteeing college to poor children who finish high school, that sort of thing. I soon discovered that while I was eagerly courted by those in charge of scholarships and such, it was my money they wanted; I was just a means of getting it, I didn’t matter. I know I can trust you not to deny so obvious an observation.”

“You can. But there’s always the matter of deciding where to give it. Only you can do that.”

“I have. Spent quite a time at it. I can leave all my money.”

“And then not have any more to live on?”

“Not even that. The income from the trust fund that is mine for life and then will go to Martin is more than ample. More than ample.”

“Yes,” Kate said. “I see.”

“You’re such a comfort to me, dear,” Flavia said. “You see things.”

“I can’t help feeling all the same that you haven’t taken advantage of your age and station in life.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you have enough money and are invisible. Have you thought where that could lead?”

“Invisible?” Flavia looked at her hand as though expecting to find it gone.

“I mean, when a woman is old, no one sees her unless she comes attached to money or some other sort of power that brings her momentarily into focus. So you must hold on to your money to become visible when you choose. It will, all in good time, get to the right causes. Meanwhile, why not have on your magic cap, be invisible, discover things?”

“I see what you mean.” Like Kate and me and my cousin Leo but like no other Fanslers, Great Aunt Flavia can leap from insight to insight, passing over the connections between. “You mean like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple–pussyfoot around. Notice people when they don’t notice you. See what’s going on. Be clever.”

“Exactly,” Kate said. “Too few people take advantage of the fun of being old; they’re always trying to pass for young.”

“I’ll have another watercress sandwich,” Flavia said. “It’s
almost dinnertime; this will save me having to think about eating.” She already had a faraway look in her eye.

SOME CONSIDERABLE TIME LATER
, I had to tell Kate that the family was again worried about Great Aunt Flavia. “Worried” was a nice word in the circumstances; they were hysterical.

“It’s Great Aunt Flavia,” I said when I had got Kate on the phone. “She’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared!” Kate all but shouted.

“In the South,” I said.

“The South,” Kate said, softer this time. I really was annoyed with her.

“If you’re just going to keep repeating everything I say, it will not help Flavia.”

“I suppose she was visiting Georgiana,” Kate said.

“You guessed right. Georgiana was quite upset on the telephone, I understand. She called Larry, you not being available.” Larry is Kate’s brother, not my father, probably the stuffiest of the brothers, which is a little like saying that one elephant is bigger than another.

“When did Flavia disappear?”

“Several days ago. Georgiana, being Southern, wanted to wait awhile before causing a fuss.”

“What was she waiting for?” Kate shouted, but I had already decided to hang up and go see Kate in person. She tended to repeat herself more on the phone than when face to face. I knew she would call Georgiana, and I wanted to be with Kate when she decided what to do, to keep informed and be part of the action. Kate never means to overlook me, but she tends to get involved and forget to tell me things.

Georgiana Montgomery had been to Bryn Mawr with
Flavia at a time when few women went to college–so Great Aunt Flavia always told us–and nice young ladies from the South never went to college, and certainly never to a Northern college. But Georgiana’s mother, who was from the North, expected her daughter to do great things, to challenge Southern ladyhood. So much for parental expectations: the nearest Georgiana came in her youth to challenging anything was in befriending Flavia. They were freshman roommates by college fiat, and roommates after that by choice. Georgiana returned South after graduation and married a proper Southern gentleman, who died twenty years later leaving her a childless and (one supposed) rich widow. All Georgiana would ever tell Flavia was that she was “comfortable.”

But Great Aunt Flavia must have had more of an effect on Georgiana than anyone realized, because bit by bit Georgiana began to work for civil rights for blacks (who, Flavia said, were called colored people in those days), and by civil rights Georgiana meant the whole bag: votes, education, desegregation all along the line. Georgiana kept her local friends because she was from an important family, had married into an important family, and was a fine person, and because (Kate guessed) she stuck to civil rights, and never went in for any other fancy ideas, like the Equal Rights Amendment, or sexual liberation, or divorce, or the idea that man’s lot wasn’t just as hard as woman’s. She wanted the colored people to have their fair rights, and apart from that, she led the life of a Southern lady.

Flavia visited Georgiana for a month every spring, both before Flavia’s husband died and after. Flavia used to say life took on a new prospect in the South, where one lived in an orderly, gracious fashion, inhaling the scent of magnolias or verbena or whatever they grow in the South, having lemonade on the porch, paying calls onGeorgiana’s friends
and having them to dinner. Most of the civil rights business was done by Georgiana on the telephone, and intruded little into their daily routine. They went their separate ways in the morning, had their lunch, separately or together in one of the nice restaurants in town (Georgiana said preparing lunch was just too much for her housekeeper), and met in the late afternoon for tea or, more likely, lemonade. Flavia said it was a most relaxing life, for one month a year.

By the time I got to Kate’s, she had reached Georgiana on the telephone and was obviously listening to some long explanation; she motioned me to sit down and keep quiet. Unobserved I would have picked up an extension and listened in, but Kate thought eavesdropping on telephone calls on the order of poisoning wells (it poisoned trust), so I waited for her to hang up and start telling me what was going on.

As it turned out, there wasn’t much to tell. The last time Georgiana saw Flavia, they had had dinner with some friends, and sat around together for a while talking of this and that. Then Flavia and Georgiana had gone to bed. A perfectly ordinary evening. Georgiana always breakfasted in her room and stayed there throughout the morning attending to business. Flavia had breakfast in the breakfast room–nothing in the least unusual. When Georgiana came downstairs preparatory to going out to lunch, she learned that Flavia had already left for her own luncheon engagement. From which Flavia never returned.

“That’s the last anybody heard from her?” I asked. “How many days ago?”

“Three days ago, four if we count today,” Kate said. “Georgiana heard from Flavia once, on the evening of the day she didn’t return. She sounded rather breathless, and simply said: ‘Don’t worry about me if you don’t see me for a
while. I’m just away for a few days. I can’t call because they’ll probably listen in on your telephone. Don’t worry.’ Georgiana insists that was the whole and exact message, and I’ve never seen any reason to doubt what Georgiana says.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked Kate.

“I’m going there, of course,” Kate said. “I have a horrible feeling I’m responsible for all this.” I knew Kate wouldn’t let me come, and she didn’t, but she did promise to call me every evening from a phone booth, in case Georgiana’s telephone was tapped.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Leighton,” Kate said sternly, while throwing things into a flight bag (Kate is not one of your neat packers), “if you don’t think we live in a total surveillance society, you had better wake up. Have you any idea the watch that can be kept on people?” she added darkly. “Please try to be home each day at six in the evening.” And with that she was gone.

KATE WENT RIGHT
to Georgiana’s from the airport and heard the whole story again while drinking lemonade on the porch. Georgiana said she had informed the police about Flavia’s disappearance, and they had made all the usual inquiries–the morgue, hospitals, reports of vagrants, old ladies hanging around bus and train stations or airports–all to no avail. “No avail,” Georgiana repeated, sighing. She had always feared Flavia would do something impulsive and foolish, and clearly Flavia had gone and done it.

“Was there anything unusual about her this time?” Kate asked Georgiana. “Was she noticeably different than on her previous visits?”

“Yes and no,” Georgiana said, in her slow, Southern way. Kate had long ago discovered that Southerners do not
think as slowly as they talk, but Northerners have to train themselves not to snatch the ends of sentences out of the mouths of their Southern friends. “Flavia seemed more, you might say
purposeful
, than I remembered her. She asked more questions, and read the papers more intensely. She even seemed more interested in my Merryfields day. Before, she always refused to go with me, saying she saw enough old folks without looking for them.”

“Merryfields?” Kate asked.

“The old people’s home, nursing home really, but we don’t like to call it that. For old folks who can’t care for themselves anymore, and haven’t any family hereabouts. It’s a nice place, for a place like that. Not like the nursing homes I read about in New York.”

Kate merely nodded. The last thing she wanted at the moment was to get Georgiana started on the merits of the South and the horrors of New York, not what Kate thought of as a productive conversation at the best of times. “Flavia seemed more interested in–er–Merryfields this time?”

“Much more interested. She surprised me right at first by offering to come with me for my weekly visit when I hadn’t even asked her–she’d always refused and I thought the question of her coming was moot. Then she asked all sorts of questions about it, and talked to many of the women patients. There are many more women patients than men, as you might expect. She even wanted to stay on when I was ready to go. I was quite concerned. ‘You aren’t thinking you might end up in a place like that, I hope, Flavia,’ I said, ‘because I wouldn’t allow it. You’d make your home right here with me,’ I said.”

“And what did she say to that?” Kate asked when Georgiana’s pause was longer than could be accounted for by the speech habits of the South.

“She said: ‘You’re a dear, Georgiana, and you know there’s always a place for you in New York with me, if the situations should be reversed.’ Now that’s about as likely as a blizzard in Alabama, but I appreciated the thought. Anyway, she wasn’t looking at Merryfields in a personal way, so I paid the matter no more mind. When Flavia’s here she always goes her own way until teatime, and I was glad she seemed occupied and busy. Mostly when she visits she reads a whole lot, but this time she seemed to spend hours in the town noticing things. I took that as a good sign; lack of interest is bad in the old. I was glad not to have to worry about Flavia on that score. I couldn’t have known, could I, that she would disappear and worry me just when I was easy in my mind?”

Kate nodded her understanding of Georgiana’s worry.

“Do you think I ought to consult the family lawyer, Matthew Finley?” Georgiana asked Kate after a time. “He’s the son of our old family lawyer, and his granddaddy was Papa’s lawyer before that. He’s young, but he understands how to deal with the world and with old folks like me. Maybe he could give us some good advice.”

“We ought to keep him in reserve, anyway,” Kate said. “In case we actually have some facts to deal with. Meantime, I think I’ll just poke around a little on my own. Try not to worry too much; the old saw about no news being good news was invented for situations just like this. Besides, I can’t imagine Flavia doing anything foolish, not really.”

“That’s the difference between us,” Georgiana said. “I can.”

KATE STAYED SEVERAL
days with Georgiana, hoping for a sign from Great Aunt Flavia, but there wasn’t the breath of
a sign. Kate called me each day at six from a phone booth as she had promised, but she had nothing to report. The police, egged on by Georgiana’s influential friends and relations, had stepped up their search, but they’d found nothing. Kate was ready to retreat back to the North, since there seemed little anyone could do down there among the magnolias or verbena or whatever it is, when the most extraordinary story appeared in the papers with the sudden force of a powerful explosion. The minister of one of the most successful of the fundamentalist churches, who had collected millions of dollars in the service of God at His explicit direction, was photographed entering a motel in Georgiana’s town with a prostitute. There was no question of the woman’s profession, nor of her understanding of her client’s intentions as they entered the motel. By that evening, the minister himself was on television–most of his congregation were reached in this way–pleading for forgiveness of his sin and promising to reform. Kate, for reasons she could not explain to herself let alone to Georgiana, decided to stay on for a bit.

When she called me that evening, she said she was talking from Georgiana’s phone, since there wasn’t any more anyone could learn by listening in. At Kate’s insistence, Georgiana had called Matthew Finley, the family lawyer, and urged him in her gentle but firm manner to discover from the newspaper that had first printed the picture where they had got it. Georgiana told Finley she would wait by her phone for an answer but could not give a reason. She made it clear, however, that her future legal business depended on prompt action: this disappearance of Flavia had gone on long enough, and if Kate thought this information would hasten Flavia’s return, she, Georgiana, would supply it.