Flora (16 page)

I was so relieved that you had nothing to worry about, after all. I found myself almost wishing you had kept the worry to yourself. I knew a girl—this was of course many years ago—who
did
discover she had something to worry about. It was not her fault, she was forced, but, as I say, this was ages ago, another lifetime, really, and I was to lose touch with her. I have often wondered how things turned out. I think I remember hearing through the grapevine that she married someone older and I like to hope things worked themselves out.

Since you asked my advice, even though your little crisis has passed, I will say to you what I’ve said before. Keep yourself to yourself until you’ve got a ring on
your finger and even then don’t tell everything. Especially not then.

I would just add it’s a smart habit to destroy correspondence. Old letters can fall into the wrong hands. I have to admit that I shuddered when you mentioned
rereading
my letters. I do wish you would deposit their main message—that I care about you and want you to be your best—in your heart and then destroy the letters.

Take care, now.

Yours truly,

Honora Anstruther

XVII.

Though our Fifth Grade game brought Flora and me closer and gave us something to plan for each day besides the next meal, it also gave me shamelessly easy access to Nonie’s letters across the hall in Flora’s drawer. After we’d finished, Flora, flushed with her successes—of which she had more and more, because she obeyed directions well—would gather up her books and say now she’d better get down to the kitchen and earn her board and keep. She would ask me what I would like for dinner and cheerfully offer tasty suggestions when I said I didn’t care.

After our classroom hour in my father’s room, I would fling myself flat on the floor, my arms and legs outspread like a prisoner on a rack, and dramatically declare myself worn out. And Flora would say, “Well of course you are. That imagination of yours must just
guzzle
energy.” At last she had stopped asking what I was going to do with the rest of my day. This was partly due to my ungracious replies during the first weeks, but the tide really had turned when I was able to say, lying on my back on the bare floor, “I’ll stay here awhile and plan tomorrow’s class while everything’s fresh in my mind, and then I’ll go out on my father’s porch and read.” The perfect child who knew how to
keep herself quietly occupied. And Flora would cross the hall and change out of her teacher dress and high heels and scuttle downstairs on her funny bare feet with the upturned nails, humming one of her tunes.

On a subsequent raid of the drawer I’d had a setback. The letters were no longer in their neat packet with the earliest conveniently at the bottom. The ribbon had been untied and cast aside and they were scattered all over, some detached from their envelopes. It was as if another unauthorized person, more careless or more desperate than me, had been plundering the drawer. I realized that of course it had to be Flora rummaging around for some remembered advice to help her get through something.

The new disarray allowed me to snatch up a letter at random and retreat to safety without having to spend time making the packet look untouched. But it destroyed my plan of reading the letters as they had been written. I had been hoping to construct a chronicle of how Nonie had been lured into the correspondence and what she might have revealed to Flora that she hadn’t had a chance to reveal to me before she died.

Forced to read the letters (some undated, often the ones missing envelopes) in this haphazard fashion, during which Nonie gamely responded to Flora’s various crises, I wasn’t sure whether Flora was sixteen or eighteen or twenty when she was having them. I wasn’t even sure what some of them were: Nonie could be maddeningly oblique. I needed Flora’s side of the correspondence because she was sure to have spilled all, but hadn’t I watched those letters disappear into Nonie’s pocket, doomed to the place of no rereadings? And she had surely taken her own advice and destroyed them as soon as possible.

I also felt let down by the, so far, few mentions of me in
the letters. I had yet to read about the little girl whose report cards were such a joy and who was the chief reason for Nonie to go on living. “I’m going to pick up Helen from school and take her to the movies so my son can have a quiet house” was not a description of the person I thought I was.

“OH DEAR, I
hope Finn is all right,” Flora said after ordering our groceries.

“Why shouldn’t he be?” I asked, though I had been wondering about him myself but didn’t want to be the one to bring it up.

“It was this impatient man on the phone. He kept cutting me off before I finished my sentences.”

“That was Mr. Crump. He owns Grove Market. I wouldn’t take it personally. He’s just in a bad mood generally.”

(“Poor Archie Crump,” Nonie had said, when we were driving home from the market. I had been complaining that Mr. Crump looked straight through me as though I wasn’t there. “He does that with all children,” said Nonie, “I wouldn’t take it personally. Things didn’t work out for him as he expected.” “What things?” “Well, Archie started off as a stock boy at Grove’s—he was in high school with Harry. Then he married Mr. Grove’s daughter, but after Mr. Grove died and Archie inherited the store, Serena Crump went off to live by herself at the beach.” “Why?” “Well,” said Nonie, pausing to assemble an answer, “maybe she came to realize she hated groceries.” This sent me into hysterical laughter. Nonie continued to face front, behind the steering wheel, her nose uplifted—so high in the air a bird could poop in it, Annie would say—but she allowed herself a wry smile. “It’s not you particularly he ignores,” she added. “He
just doesn’t notice children in general.” “Maybe we make him sad because he never had any,” I suggested. “That’s a sweet thought, darling,” she said, reaching over to pat my hand.)

“I just hope Finn’s not unwell,” Flora went on.

“He was probably already out delivering groceries,” I said. But now she had me worried. Could his lung or his mental state have collapsed again? Could he have displeased Mr. Crump and gotten fired? I was surprised at the alarm such prospects raised in me. Ever since his evening with us, I had been plotting how, as soon as Flora left, my father and I would ask Finn to come and live with us. “You can be our honorary Recoverer,” I imagined myself saying to him. I had Starling Peake’s room picked out for him, with the nicest of the oriental rugs my father had discarded, and we could put in a desk where he could draw views from the window, after he had topped the trees, which he had already offered to do. He would drive me to and from school in Nonie’s car and we would run errands as Nonie and I had done and my father would pay him “something,” as he was paying Flora “something.” Finn’s joining us would improve life for all three of us. In the evenings, the two men would have their drinks together and I would serve them Flora’s cheese straws, which I was going to have her teach me to make. And by the time Finn came to live with us, I would also have learned to cook a few meals whose aromas could make a man swoon.

But it was Mr. Crump in the Grove Market van who arrived with our order in the late afternoon. Flora got off to a bad start with him by flying out barefooted and asking where Finn was.

“Day off,” said Crump with a scowl. “That driveway of yours is a liability.”

“We’re getting it fixed as soon as the war is over,” I piped up, but he neither heard nor saw me.

“Here, let me help you with those boxes,” said Flora.

“Better go back,” he warned, looking her up and down. “You’ll cut up your feet.”

“Oh, they’re tough as old nails,” Flora said with a laugh, wresting a box away from him. But then, going triumphantly up the porch stairs ahead of him, she stubbed her toe and yelped, almost dropping the box.

“What’d I tell you,” said Crump, with the nearest thing to a smile I had ever caught on his sour face. He held the door for her and set down his box of groceries next to hers on the kitchen counter. Then he took a deep breath and let out an animal-like groan.

“Are you all right, Mr. Crump?”

“Yes, ma’am. It was just—”

“Oh, please call me Flora. I’m Helen’s cousin. Her mother and I grew up together in Alabama. Why don’t you sit down a minute, Mr. Crump, if you can spare the time. I’ve got some corn bread ready to come out and it’s never better than when you have it hot with a glass of cold milk. That’s what I’m going to do, and it would be nice to have some company. Helen, how about you?”

“No, thank you. I’m going out.”

I fled to the garage, to sit in Nonie’s car and fume, but not before I’d heard Flora begin to confide how hard the summer had been for “poor Helen being cooped up with nobody but me, what with this polio scare and her little friend and she misses her grandmother …” Old spill-all Flora, even to such an audience as Mr. Crump. Had she really thought I was going to sit down at the table with that rude old man and let him ignore me some more?

I was disgusted by the whole scene between them. Why did
she show no discrimination about people? If it had been Finn (why had he taken a day off during the workweek?) I could see her inviting him to sit down for corn bread and company. But didn’t she see how Mr. Crump had looked almost happy when she stubbed her toe? Even his own wife couldn’t stand him and had to go off and live at the beach.

I sat in the car, rocking the steering wheel to the left and to the right. I turned an imaginary key in the ignition and heard the engine roar into life. “Now, back out slowly,” Finn instructed from the passenger’s seat. “There is no rush. No rush, a-tall, a-tall. I saw the way you made up your mind to jump, that day in the woods. You can do anything you set your mind to.”

At last Flora and Crump emerged from the house. I could see them without turning my head. They were talking and looking toward the car. If they walked over, I would look right through Mr. Crump. If Flora addressed me, I would have to answer, but I would do it in a way to make Mr. Crump feel he wasn’t there. I prepared it so well I was disappointed when I heard the grocery van start up and watched it bump down the drive. Flora went back into the house. I would do the next best thing, I decided. I wouldn’t say his name to Flora no matter what. It would be like she’d been having the corn bread all by herself and there was nothing to talk about.

But Flora, in full dinner-making mode now, was eager to talk. “It seems Finn had some important meeting today with a medical board out at the military hospital.”

I kept silence, not rising to my usual “How did you know that?”

“It seems,” Flora went on, “the Army is reviewing his case. He may get an honorable discharge instead of a medical discharge, and then he’d be entitled to all the normal GI benefits.”

“But he said he was already discharged.”

“Yes, but evidently his father, who knows some senator, got involved and now they have to reconsider.”

So far she had substituted “it seems” and “evidently” for a certain person’s name. Was she tacitly obeying my embargo? Had all those hours playing fifth-grade class together sharpened her sense of me?

But over dinner (we were having macaroni and cheese, along with the milk a certain person had delivered and drank some of) she allowed herself some
he
s and
him
s.

“I’m so glad I asked him to sit down a minute. When he groaned like that I thought he was ill, but you know what it was?”

I narrowed my eyes at a heaped forkful of macaroni and cheese.

“It was the corn bread,” said Flora. “He smelled the corn bread and it reminded him of his mother. He told me that after we had talked awhile. Isn’t that touching?”

I filled my mouth with the heaped forkful and looked out the window.

“Oh, and he asked if your father was interested in selling the Oldsmobile. He wants it for his wife.”

“His wife! She doesn’t even live here!”

“No, but he said she had always admired Mrs. Anstruther’s touring car. He was thinking he might drive it down to her at the beach and come back on the bus. If she had such a car, Serena—isn’t that a nice name?—might be tempted to come home more. I gather there have been some differences between them, but, you know, Helen, differences sometimes get ironed out over time. Look at your uncle Sam and aunt Garnet in Alabama, getting remarried after being separated for twenty-six
years. Wouldn’t it be sweet if Mrs. Anstruther’s car were to be the means of their reconciliation?”

“My father isn’t going to sell my grandmother’s car so the
Crumps
can get reconciled.”

“Of course not, honey. I only meant … And besides, it’s up to your father. I told him that.”

XVIII.

When did remorse fall into disfavor? It was sometime during the second half of my life. As a child, I knelt next to Nonie in church and said alongside her sedate contralto:
the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable
. Then, for a long time I didn’t go to church, and when I next said the General Confession it had been watered down to
we are truly sorry and we humbly repent
. If someone had really done you an ill turn and later came to you and said, “I am truly sorry,” would that mean as much to you as “the burden of it has been intolerable to me”?

Remorse is wired straight to the heart. “Stop up the access and passage to remorse,” Lady Macbeth bids the dark spirits, “that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose.”

Remorse went out of fashion around the same time that “Stop feeling guilty,” and “You’re too hard on yourself,” and “You need to love yourself more” came into fashion.

“The summer I turned eleven,” I might begin, and often have begun, “I was left in the care of my late mother’s first cousin. She
was twenty-two. It was for the most part a boring, exasperating summer. Such an isolated summer would not be possible today. We had the radio and the mail and the telephone (though few people wrote or called) and the woman who came to clean on Tuesdays and the man who delivered our groceries. Most days my feelings fell somewhere on the scale between bored / protected and bored / superior. But there were also times when I felt I had to fight to keep from losing the little I had been left with, including my sense of myself. Maybe I fought too hard. Anyway, the summer ended terribly (grievously?) and I have wondered ever since how much of it I caused.”