Authors: Gail Godwin
Where was this heading?
“I don’t have long, so here goes. Mammy saw Mrs. Huff downtown and Mrs. Huff said your behavior had really hurt them.”
“My behavior! What did I do?”
“It’s not so much what you did as what you didn’t do. You stayed in their house for a whole week. You slept in Rachel’s room and swam in her pool for an entire week and haven’t called her since. You never even sent a thank-you note.”
Oh, God, I hadn’t. Counterattack was my only defense. “Have
you
always remembered to send thank-you notes?”
“It’s not your turn, Helen. I haven’t finished. You were always—” She stopped and then made a new start. “You’re smart, Helen, and I used to consider you my best friend, but your trouble is you think you’re better than other people. Mrs. Huff told
Mammy that you got it from your grandmother. Who we all know went around with her nose stuck up so high a bird could have pooped in it.”
“Mrs. Huff said that?”
“The bird-poop part was me, but the rest was her.”
“That’s not fair! She’s dead!”
“Yes, and you’ve got a few more months of people feeling sorry for you. But after that, you’d better take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror.”
I could hardly breathe I was so hurt, but something told me to snatch what lemon-truths I could out of her before she rode out of my life forever. “What do you think is wrong with me?”
“What do I think? Well, it so happens I’ve thought a lot about it. Other people don’t exist when you’re not with them. We’re like toys or something. You play with them and examine them and then you put them on a shelf and go away. We don’t have lives, we’re just your playthings.”
Was this true? The idea struck home somehow. Yet there was something satisfying about others thinking of me like that. It put me out of the zone where I could get hurt.
Flora-like, my own eyes were leaking. Among other things, I felt I had not defended Nonie as she deserved.
“Listen,” said Annie, “Mammy is hovering, saying I have to get off the phone so they can disconnect it. Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Was I too harsh?”
“No, you were just being … lemony.”
“I really liked you, Helen. It’s just that—”
“I’m going to hang up now, Annie. Good luck with your new friends. And remember to keep your mouth closed when you chew.”
I hung up quietly and sat for some minutes at the wobbly little phone desk in the upstairs hall. It had been in the same spot ever since I could remember, though the phone models had changed. I was glad she was leaving town. She wouldn’t be around to blab her findings to anyone else.
But Mrs. Huff would. She was probably standing on some street corner right now, waiting to tell another mother about my bad behavior. If Nonie had been alive, I would have written the thank-you note and I would have written to Brian before Father McFall forced me into it. It was true I had been counting on people feeling sorry for me and overlooking my lapses because I had lost my grandmother.
I could hear Flora downstairs (she sounded as though she was in the living room) humming “Begin the Beguine” in breathless, hopping snatches, while she scrubbed something with a brush. What had she found to scrub that Mrs. Jones hadn’t already scrubbed?
All the unoccupied rooms were left open to keep them, Mrs. Jones said, from getting that shut-up smell. (“Empty rooms need to breathe so they can stay connected to the rest of the house.”)
The doors to the two front rooms, my father’s and Flora’s, were closed. I suppose Mrs. Jones felt that my father, as living head of the household, occupied the Hyman Highsmith room in spirit even though he was away at Oak Ridge. This was the room my father and mother had shared. It had its own porch entrance, to the south porch, just as Flora’s Willow Fanning room had its own porch entrance to the west porch.
I entered my father’s room, which smelled of furniture polish. It was the barest room in the house. After some recent falls from too much Jack Daniel’s, he had rolled up the handsome
Persian area rugs and bestowed them on the two lesser Recoverers’ rooms. That left the bed that he and my mother had slept in and the bookcase he had made and an old Victorian flattop desk he had found at a sale and refinished. The bookcase held only books about carpentry or furniture and was more empty than full. Mrs. Jones had outdone herself on the bare wood in this room because there was more of it here than anything else. Trophies from my father’s public life were on display at the other end of the hall, in Doctor Cam’s old consulting room, which Nonie had made into a family shrine room. Harry’s college diploma was in a frame next to my grandfather’s medical credentials. His bound senior thesis in history (“The Decline of Southern Honor After Appomattox”) leaned against Doctor Cam’s bound volume of handwritten poems (“midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this December morn / a boy is born”). The family photos were also in the shrine room (a stiff-looking Nonie in long skirts holding the newborn Harry, a studio portrait of a younger Doctor Cam before he met Nonie, Lisbeth and Harry and Nonie on my parents’ wedding day, and lots of me in all my stages to date. There was this one photo of my mother in a fur coat squatting beside me in my snowsuit. She looked strained by her squatting position but determined to pose like a mother enjoying the snow with her child.
“Isn’t it about time,” Nonie had cheerfully suggested to my father not so long ago, “we started calling the Hyman Highsmith room the Harry Astruther room? You’ve been living in it, except for college, since you were sixteen.”
“Oh, let’s keep it the Hyman Highsmith room,” my father had said. “Harry Anstruther doesn’t live in it.”
“Then who does, pray tell?”
“You tell me.”
Downstairs, Flora, still erupting little snatches of “Begin the Beguine,” was scrubbing something more distant than whatever she had been scrubbing before. I had no hesitation in crossing the hall and entering her room. I had done this in imagination already and had progressively worked out the kinks in my plan. I opened the top drawer. The packet of letters now faced downward and the ribbon that bound them was looser than it had been when I first saw her place them in the drawer. She must have been reading them. I was able to slide the face-down top letter from its envelope without disturbing the ribbon. When you are doing something behind someone’s back, you feel slightly cheated if they make it too easy. You may even feel they deserve it. Heart thudding, I quietly let myself out of her room, crossed the hall, reentered my father’s room, closing the door, and went outside to the south porch. Shut off twice, I felt twice protected.
I read the letter standing at the rail, which was prickly with peeled paint. It took me several tries before I calmed down enough to register what was in it. It was clearly Nonie’s first reply in the famous correspondence, which meant Flora probably kept the letters in chronological order, with the first one at the bottom. I was disappointed. Nonie didn’t come through as strong and wise as I had expected, and what she conveyed was more confusing than enlightening. I was mentioned only once, at the very end—almost like a dutiful afterthought.
I couldn’t wait to retrace my furtive route and get the thing back in its envelope, though I resolved to read more of the letters whenever opportunities arose. Meanwhile I would be thinking up ways to make those opportunities.
November 4, 1938
Dear Flora,
Your news has distressed us. My heart goes out to you. It is a terrible thing to lose a parent and all the more devastating when you only have the one to lose. In the short time we were with your father, it was clear how much he loved you and looked out for you.
Of
course
I don’t mind your writing to me. The truth is we have been worrying and wondering ever since you left. We never heard from you after the week you stayed with us following Lisbeth’s funeral.
Yes, it is doubly hard for you, as you said, to have lost the two people you loved most within a single year. Though it has been almost a year since Lisbeth’s death, I am still fairly reeling from the loss of her. You had her when you were a child and I had her when I was old enough to be her mother. But she was more than “like a daughter” to me. She was the better, cooler young woman I wished I had been, and I loved watching her grow in self-confidence. She was one of those people who flourish best under a certain amount
of protection, and I like to think we provided her with that protection. Lisbeth and I were not demonstrative women, but we treasured each other’s company and admired each other. I had things to teach her and she had things to teach us. I miss her more than I can say.
It wasn’t kind for those girls at school to say you should just tell people your father died of “lead poisoning.” Of course, as you say, it was in the papers and everyone knew about the card game and the shooting. But you know, Flora, in future when you meet people all you need to say is that your father died when you were fifteen. That is enough.
Harry joins me in sending his deepest sympathy, and little Helen would, too, if she were old enough to understand. She is my joy and my responsibility now.
Do write to me whenever you feel like it. I will always reply.
Yours truly,
Honora Anstruther
Flora and I argued about everything on the Sunday that Finn was expected for dinner.
“I’m making those cheese straws you like,” Flora said, “and a pitcher of lemonade for when we are sitting in the living room getting acquainted. How does that sound?”
“We always offer cocktails to our company,” I said. “Even Father McFall has his gin and limewater. And my father always has his drink before dinner.”
“Or drinks,” said Flora.
“You shouldn’t criticize my father.”
“Well, I’m not, honey. It was just a statement of fact.”
Then it was how we were going to serve the meal. Flora wanted us to help our plates in the kitchen so the food would stay hot.
“Why can’t
you
serve the plates in the kitchen and bring them to us at the table. That way, things would stay just as hot.”
“Well, if you think—”
“It would be more elegant that way,” I said.
Then there was the matter of where Finn should sit. “He
should sit on your left, Helen. You’ll be head of the table as always.”
“But the guest of honor always sits on the right.”
“Well, but on your left he’ll get the view of the sunset over the mountains. On your right, it’ll just be the wall.”
I could tell she had given a lot of thought to this and felt I should give in, especially since I had gotten my way about her serving the plates, which was how I had been picturing it.
Then there was the fuss over what each of us should wear. “My good suit seems too dressy, especially when I have to tie an apron over it.”
“Just wear one of your regular dresses,” I said.
“Or I could wear that nice skirt, the one Juliet made from your mother’s dress, with a simple blouse—”
“No! Just one of your regular dresses.”
“What about you, Helen? Have you decided?”
“I’ll wear the dress I wore to church. I like it.” It was one of the last dresses Nonie had bought for me: a small blue and white check with a white piqué collar that had a single red emblem on it like Chinese writing.
“Well, that’s the main thing, isn’t it? A person wants to feel comfortable.”
But when I stepped into the dress and started to button it up the front, there was a nasty surprise. It wasn’t exactly that I had started sprouting new parts, but when I forced the top button, I looked like a little girl who had outgrown her dress. But I had worn it to church. How could this have happened? Cursing Flora and all her tasty meals, I tore the dress off and stuffed it into the darkest corner of the closet, behind Nonie’s shoe boxes, and, after some exasperating wrong choices, settled on a plaid pleated skirt and school blouse.
Finn, wearing a suit, roared up on his delivery cycle on the dot of six. He looked kind of weakened without his paratrooper boots, and there was something about his hair that made him resemble a puppy run through a bath. He’d brought us flowers from the farmers’ market, which Flora made a great deal of ceremony about arranging in a vase, and as he passed through our kitchen he said the aroma was enough to make a man swoon. His feet in civilian shoes were small and dainty, like a dancing master’s. How sad that all of us had gone to so much trouble and none of us looked as good as we usually did. Flora had obeyed me and worn an unobjectionable dress, but she had done something extra with her makeup that made her eyes and mouth too sultry.
The cheese straws and the lemonade awaited us in the living room.
“Now, Helen tells me cocktails are always offered to company in this house,” Flora said, “so, honey, what are his choices?” Though she was honoring my wishes, she also managed to make it sound like a concession to a child.
“Ah, thank you, no,” Finn said before I could begin my recitation. “I’ve been on the dry ever since my little set-to with the lungs. However, that lemonade looks grand.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “we’d get a Recoverer who’d just been cured of TB and was dying for a drink. My grandfather said this was a tricky proposition.”
“Oh, why was that?” asked Finn, interested.
“Because the drink was like a reward but it might be just the thing to start him down the road to having to be cured of something else.”
Accepting his glass of lemonade, Finn laughed and looked at me admiringly. “Were all the Recoverers men?”
“Oh no,” Flora jumped in. “For instance, my room, the room I’m staying in for the summer, is called the Willow Fanning room. I don’t know much about Willow Fanning, but Helen’s grandmother told me she was quite a handful for such a delicate person and they came to regret taking her in.”