Flora (20 page)

He looked surprised, then laughed. “Will I be one of your Recoverers, then?” He stooped and gave me a hug. “We’ll have to see, darling,” he said. “We’ll have to see how things fall out.”

But he had also given Flora a hug. And called her “love.”

IN THE LAST
days of July, Flora’s and my fifth-grade class languished due to sudden breakdowns and interruptions at Old One Thousand. First, the garbage truck got stuck in a rut and we had to call a tow truck and the garbage man yelled at us that he wasn’t coming again until we got our f——ing driveway fixed.

“Please, sir!” cried Flora. “There’s a child present. Her father is off doing important war work in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and it will be fixed as soon as he returns next month.” She began to cry softly and also the driver had heard of Oak Ridge,
and he and the driver of the tow truck ended up fashioning a makeshift bridge of planks over the rut and gratefully accepting coffee and hot corn bread from Flora in the kitchen before they left.

Then the downspout that had been hanging tipsily sideways from the gutter fell down across the lawn—or former lawn.

“Oh, dear,” moaned Flora, “we’ll have to get someone.”

“Leave it till my father gets back,” I said. I didn’t say that I was hoping he might surprise us and show up for my birthday, which was a little over a week away.

“Well, I don’t know, honey. Nobody likes to come home and see pieces of their house all over the ground. It looks like someone hasn’t been taking care of things.”

“It’s just one piece, and you can’t even see it when you drive up. You’re only supposed to be taking care of me, not the house.”

But Flora decided to phone Mr. Crump at Grove Market, to ask if he knew of a “reasonable” carpenter, and Finn answered and said he could do it if we had a ladder, which we did. He asked if it could wait until the weekend and Flora said it could and thanked him too profusely.

Then the toilet in the Willow Fanning half bath got clogged, and Flora cried and said now everyone would blame her for flushing something down it when she hadn’t. She phoned the plumber listed in Nonie’s little “Majordomo” book, but the number had been disconnected. “And I can’t call Mr. Crump again,” she wailed.

“Why not? He’s bound to know a plumber.”

“
Because
, don’t you see? Finn might answer again and offer to fix it himself when he comes to do the gutter and that would be humiliating.”

I saw Finn kneeling in front of Flora’s toilet, pulling out something disgusting. It made me want to laugh, but not for long. It would reflect on me, too, and make him not want to live in our house.

But Flora fetched the plunger and went at the Willow Fanning toilet so violently it choked up an enormous soggy wad, which she insisted on my inspecting. “I want you to see there’s nothing in it but toilet paper. But it’s still my fault, I’ve been using too much. At home, Juliet had this rule: two squares for number one, four for number two, unless it was—”

“Okay, okay!”

I SET TO
work on my refurbishment of Starling Peake’s old room, which I was already secretly calling the Devlin Patrick Finn room. There wasn’t any deep cleaning to do; Mrs. Jones had been faithful with that. The floor was regularly vacuumed, the windowsills scrubbed, the curtains and bedspread laundered, and the furniture polished—though there was way too much furniture. The two “lesser” Recoverers’ rooms had become repositories for castoffs, like my father’s Persian carpets that had tripped him once too often and twiggy-legged tables and plant stands and framed pictures and mirrors turned to the wall.

I first thought I’d tell Flora I was fixing up this room for when new friends came to stay over. But I had grown so adept at predicting her responses I could hear her ask why I didn’t put them in my old room downstairs. So instead I told her I wanted to make a study upstairs for myself.

“But, honey, why that gloomy old room? If you want an upstairs study, why not take your grandfather’s consulting room, with all its nice shelves?”

“That’s for family trophies and things. And my father goes in there to look things up in books.”

“Oh, in that case. But wouldn’t the Recoverer’s room across the hall be more cheerful? It gets the morning sun.”

“I don’t always want to be cheerful. I like gloom, too. Besides, when I get home from school it will be the afternoon.”

“That’s true,” she conceded.

“I just have a feeling about that room. I like it.”

“I wonder if—?”

“What?”

“Your mother kept her clothes in the big old wardrobe in there. I remember going in and sniffing them after her funeral. There was still her scent. Maybe rooms can—Oh, I don’t know, honey. It’s your house and you can pick whichever room you want. I should learn to keep my big mouth shut.”

IN STARLING PEAKE’S
old room was a hulking old cheval dresser with a tilting mirror. Its drawers were crammed with the saddest detritus you could imagine. Each item must once have had a purpose but now gave up its history to a meaningless mound of junk. The prospect of emptying the drawers was so depressing I decided to wait for Mrs. Jones.

“What do you want to do with all this?” she asked, after a grim survey.

“I want it not to be in there.”

This prompted one of her rare closed-mouthed laughs. “Let’s take it out, then, and lay it down on a cloth. You can go over it better that way.”

“One drawer at a time, or all three?”

“Oh, let’s get it all out.” She made it sound like a daring proposal.

She found an old quilt in the wardrobe and spread it out on the bed.

“Flora said my mother used to keep her clothes in that wardrobe.”

“She did. There wasn’t enough room in your father’s closet.”

“I wonder where they went.”

“Your grandmother gave them away. I helped her box them up. It was hard for her. She set great store by Miss Lisbeth.”

“Do you remember my mother?”

“Well, naturally I do.”

“Did you like her?”

“She was always very nice to me. I didn’t see much of her because she was at the high school all day with your father. The only time I got to know her a little was the spring and summer she was expecting you. She would rest on the bed in here sometimes.”

“In this room?”

“She said it was cooler and she liked being out of everybody’s way. When I was going over the room we would talk.”

“What about?”

“Oh, she asked what it was like when I was expecting Rosemary and if I had been as big and felt as awkward in my final months. I told her I had a much bigger frame than her and could carry the extra weight better and that I had been born awkward. This cheered her up. Usually she had a book or two on the bed with her. If she was reading we didn’t talk, unless she spoke first.”

“What kind of books?”

“Schoolbooks. She couldn’t wait to go back to her teaching. One time she read a poem to me about a lady who had to stay in a room with her back to the window. She couldn’t look out directly or she would bring down some kind of curse, but she rigged a mirror so she could see the reflection of the road below and could watch life going on through the mirror.”

“What was that poem?”

“I don’t rightly recall, but I do remember her saying this room was like it because you could look out the window and see the road down below, only she didn’t have to use a mirror.”

“But how could she see the road from the bed?”

“The bed was over by the window, then. You could lie on it and look down through the trees and see Sunset Drive. It’s all blocked in now, but you could still see the road back then.”

Checker pieces with no board—a perfume atomizer—a rusty harmonica with dust in the holes—a shaving brush with stiff bristles—a crudely carved wooden giraffe with its broken neck glued back on—empty gift boxes and folded Christmas wrapping paper—string and ribbons—a cloudy magnifying glass—a tarnished sugar spoon with something crusty in its bowl—a cutglass bottle of dried-out smelling salts—an empty tin of Sears, Roebuck gunpowder tea filled with rubber bands and paper clips—pen nibs and pencil stubs—boxes of rifle cartridges—a small square porcelain dish with a scene of trees and a lake and HANDPAINTED IN NIPPON written on the bottom—a used elastic bandage—an ivory cigarette holder—a silk sleeping mask—a guide to palmistry with the cover torn off—an extension cord—two buckeyes—a silver flask (no monogram) without its top—a rubber stem syringe with a red bulb—an empty box that said: “German Liquor Cure: 24 doses”—a sealed pack of playing cards—a Standard Accident Insurance Company of Detroit date
book for 1923 with “nb” faithfully recorded in pencil for every day in the month of January, followed by empty pages for the rest of the year—a small tarnished silver tray stuffed inside a wad of tissue and brown paper; on the tray was engraved the profile of a bird and ALABAMA, THE YELLOWHAMMER STATE.

“I’d go over each item with a damp cloth before you lay it out on the bed,” Mrs. Jones had suggested before leaving. “If there’s things you’re not sure what to do with, we can look those over when I come next week.”

The sorting-out part took longer than I expected. There were things I knew I shouldn’t throw out, even though I wanted them out of the room. There were some puzzling objects that I wanted to look at some more before I consigned them to the trash. And there were a few things that might be of use to Finn: the extension cord and the sealed pack of cards, and the buck-eyes for good luck—I could tell him about the local legends if he didn’t know them. But he definitely wouldn’t want someone’s disgusting old shaving brush or a flask with no top, or even if it had a top because he was on the dry. Each survivor of the trash I carefully wiped down before placing it on the bed. (Would Finn like to have his bed moved back to the window?)

When at last I surveyed my final collection on the bed, I ferociously regretted the loss of Annie Rickets.

(“Oh, boy, let’s get to work. There are different ways we could do this, Helen. We could each take one patient at a time and pick out items for them and then deduce their secrets from their items, or we could go item by item and decide who it belonged to, and then—No, that’s much too infantile for us: my first idea is better. I’ll go first if you let me start with the Willing Fanny. The sleeping mask is definitely hers, and probably the cigarette holder, and she has to have the perfume atomizer, unless
one of the male patients was a fairy, and also the smelling salts, and I think she should have the crusted spoon—a ladylike slurp of opium for the long, boring afternoon ahead at Shangri-la. Oh, sorry, I’m taking too many? Okay, you can have the opium spoon back. But I have to insist that syringe is hers, because it’s not the kind you use for enemas, it’s what women use when they need to shoot water and Lysol up inside them. My mammy has one and she says it has kept us from being a family of ten. That date book could be a man’s or a woman’s, so I won’t be greedy. But I’ll bet anything those
nb
’s stand for either ‘no blood’ or ‘no booze.’ The ‘no booze’ is if they were on the wagon. The other could be either someone who’s missed her period or, more boringly, a former tubercular who’s counting his good days. Breaking off like that could mean they fell off the wagon or got her period or didn’t get it, or, in the case of the tubercular, the blood came back and he expired.”)

Flora was standing in the doorway. “Supper is ready when you are, honey. Goodness! What is all that?”

“Junk from the drawers in here.”

She approached the bed. “It’s not all junk. That’s a perfectly good extension cord, and, look, what a sweet little painted dish—”

“I
know
. I’m sorting it
out
. I just don’t want it in those drawers, in a big
clump
, where it’s been laying useless for years—”

“Oh! That’s our calling card tray!”

“Whose calling card tray?”

“The one we sent to Lisbeth for a wedding present. Where did you find this, Helen?”

“I told you. In those drawers.”

“Just … lying with all the junk?” She scooped it up and cradled it in her palms.

“No, it had lots of paper around it.”

“What kind of paper?”

“Just the brown paper things get mailed in. And there was some tissue paper, too. It was all scrunched up together.”

“Where is it? Did you throw it away?”

“Yes, but it’s still in the trash basket over there.”

Already she was at the basket. “Oh, God, here it is!” Now she was pulling apart the brown paper from the tissue. Such a frenzy over some old wrapping paper. “Oh, I don’t believe this! The card’s still in here!”

“I didn’t see any card.”

“Here it is. Oh, my daddy’s own sweet handwriting.” The tears were at the ready. “All of us signed it. See?”

She proudly showed me the signatures on the card: a younger Flora’s, the bold scrawls of the men, and, familiar to me from her letters to Flora, the proper slant of Juliet Parker.

“It is sterling silver,” said Flora. “Juliet picked it out, but we all contributed. But why did Lisbeth stuff it away with all that junk? Still in its paper! I wonder if she even saw the card.”

“Who says it was her? It was probably someone else after she died. They saw it out on a table and said, ‘Oh, what is this for?’ and then put it in the drawer.”

“No,” said Flora, cradling the little tray like a wounded animal. “It wasn’t ever out on any table. When I stayed here that week after the funeral I looked everywhere. I understand now. I was a fool not to see it before. Lisbeth hated it. She was ashamed of it. Just another piece of Alabama trash.”

“That is just ridiculous,” I said (though suspecting she might have a point). “You really need to have more faith in yourself, Flora. And if you don’t have it, you at least have to act like you do.”

“That is exactly what your grandmother would have said,” marveled Flora, regarding me with fond respect.

“What
is
a yellowhammer anyway?”

“Why, it’s our state bird. It’s the sweetest little woodpecker with these bright yellow underwings. Juliet has three yellowhammer boxes in our backyard. My daddy made the boxes for her. They have to be made just so. When the babies fledge, our whole backyard is aflutter with yellow wings.”