Flora (8 page)

“I admire that woman,” Nonie said. “Despite all her adversities, Beryl Jones manages to stay in control of her days. How many people do you know who can do that?”

On this Tuesday, Flora took it on herself to welcome Mrs. Jones to the house. “I’m Helen’s first cousin once removed. Her mother and I grew up together in Alabama. Sometimes she was like my big sister and sometimes she was like a little mother. Did I meet you at the funeral reception, Mrs. Jones?”

“No, ma’am, I wasn’t able to make the reception.”

“Oh, please, call me Flora. And whatever I can do to help you, just let me know. I’m Helen’s caretaker for the summer while her father’s away, but I’ve got plenty of free time for housework.”

“Oh, my routine more or less runs me,” said Mrs. Jones. “I would get all turned around if someone was to try to help. I do the downstairs in the morning, and then if it’s warm like today I eat my lunch upstairs on the south porch, and in the afternoon I turn out the upstairs rooms.”

“Well,” said Flora, “in that case, I guess I’ll go up and work on some lesson plans. I start teaching school in the fall. I’m in the Willow Fanning room.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know. I do that room first, after I’ve swept the upstairs porches.”

“Well, don’t worry, I’ll make myself scarce. I have some shelf reorganizing I want to do in the kitchen. But I already went and stripped my bed for you.”

“That was thoughtful, but there was no need.”

I lurked about while Mrs. Jones scrubbed the kitchen floor on her knees and went over her life. I tried some more of my library book, but my own life seemed more urgent and mysterious than the girl researching someone else’s old house. I walked around our house, forcing myself to acknowledge more signs of decay, and fantasized that we would somehow come into money and make everything nice again. I heard my father forbidding me to risk becoming a woman with the shrunken legs of a child, and pictured Brian Beale’s ten-year-old legs withering this very minute beneath the covers of his hospital bed. I knew I should be writing a note to him in time for postman to take it away, but couldn’t make myself do it. I thought of Finn, with his pointy features and carrot crew cut, rushing over to the lonely old lady on his motorcycle whenever she remembered something she’d forgotten to order. He’d roar up in front of her modest little house that didn’t have a refrigerator and tell her it was no trouble “a-
tall
.” I prepared some interesting things I would say to him next time—if I could get them in before Flora interrupted and brought things down to her level.

I materialized when I heard Mrs. Jones starting on my grandmother’s room.

“I can still feel her in here,” said Mrs. Jones, holding her feather duster aloft in front of the blinds like a conductor raising his baton.

“I had this dream.” I got right to the point. “She told me she wanted me to move into this room. She said you would understand.”

Mrs. Jones clasped the duster to her breast. “She mentioned me?”

“She said, ‘Mrs. Jones respects dreams and is partial to the supernatural.’ Those were her exact words.”

“Dear me if that doesn’t sound just like her. The dead can speak to you anytime they like, whether you’re awake or asleep. Whether you listen or not is up to you.”

“She said I was to ask you to make up her room for me.”

“Did she say we should empty out drawers, or what?”

I considered a moment. “No, just make up the bed. I’ll go through her things myself.”

“That’s what I did with Rosemary’s things. I went through them a little at a time and let them bring her back.”

“You know, I think I am growing up,” I said.

“Well, surely you are.” Mrs. Jones had laid aside her duster and started on the bed, as though being guided by Nonie.

“No, I mean I’m understanding things this summer that I couldn’t understand even this past winter.”

“Like what, dear?”

“Well, like Rosemary’s diphtheria and my mother’s parents in the flu epidemic, all in the same year. Before, I just couldn’t get my mind around it. Your seven-year-old daughter and those people from such a long time ago. It was the same year, 1918, but I just couldn’t see how they could all fit into that same time period.”

“That’s the thing about the dead,” observed Mrs. Jones happily, lifting up the mattress pad and giving it a vigorous shake. “They make you understand that time isn’t as simple as you thought.”

She let me help make up the bed. “It’s the right thing that you should have this room,” she said. “You’re the lady of the house now.”

“But I’m not going to tell Flora about the dream.” Here I had to remind myself that Nonie had considered the whole truth too much even for Mrs. Jones. Even I had almost forgotten that Nonie’s voice in the garage told me to say the instructions came to me in a dream.

“Well, that’s up to you, dear.”

“Flora is very—” I hovered between wanting to betray and wanting to appear loyal. “I’m not sure she’d be able to understand. I’m just going to tell her moving in here was something I decided to do and leave it at that.”

“Well, like I said,” Mrs. Jones reiterated, “you’re the lady of the house now.”

AT SUPPER I
let Flora go on about all she’d accomplished while Mrs. Jones had been cleaning the house. In the morning she’d answered Juliet Parker’s letter and walked it down to the box just in time for the mailman, which made me feel guilty because I hadn’t written my note to Brian. Then she’d worked up some fifth-grade geography lesson plans and created a behavior chart for her class: “You know: neatness, courtesy, self-control, so they’ll know what I expect from them.”

In the afternoon she had reorganized the cupboard shelves and the refrigerator. “I kept thinking how that nice delivery boy said so many people still don’t have them and I felt positively luxurious.”

“His name is Finn.”

“Is that his first name or his last?”

“He just said Finn. He was in the war until his lung collapsed, so he’s not exactly a boy anymore.”

“You two really had a conversation, didn’t you? I heard you
talking a lot with Mrs. Jones, too. You miss your friends, don’t you, honey?”

“Mrs. Jones was helping me move into my grandmother’s room.”

“Oh, well, goodness, that’s a change.” I could see she was taken aback.

“It’s something I decided to do,” I said. I quoted the voice in the garage: “It was her place and now it will be my place.”

“It certainly is a nice big room,” said Flora, “if you’re sure it won’t make you sad.”

“I’m sad already, so I might as well be sad in there.”

I COULD HARDLY
wait to go to bed that night, but there were amenities to be gotten through first. Flora said I wasn’t getting enough exercise for a young person, so after supper while it was still quite light we pitched into the rutty driveway, giggling and steadying each other, and walked down to the hairpin curve on Sunset Drive where the thick woods sloped off to the right and my grandfather’s shortcut reproached us with its unsightly neglect. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could
repair
the path, somehow,” said Flora, “and surprise your father when he gets back. Only I wouldn’t know where to begin, would you?”

“You’d have to cut down
years
of overgrowth,” I said. “It would take really serious tools. And the handrails are all rotted, they’re dangerous even to touch. And someone could fall into that crater and be badly hurt. It would have to be filled in and for that you’d need to get dirt from somewhere.” I was sounding like the adult, talking the child out of an impractical idea.

Tuesday evening there was a mystery program Nonie and I liked, and Flora and I sat curled on the sofa with our shoes off,
listening to the cabinet radio with the big speakers. We agreed not to turn on lamps so we could be more scared. This one was about a little girl who gets separated from her mother in a department store. They look and look for her, the store detective, the manager, the police, but she just isn’t anywhere to be found, and night comes and the store has to close, and the distraught mother lets herself be convinced that the girl wandered out of the store and the police will have to continue an all-night search through the town. But the little girl has fallen asleep behind some crates in a stockroom and when she wakes up she’s at first frightened because her mother is gone, but then all these nice, elegant, well-dressed people, even some well-dressed children, come out from the shadows of the department store and befriend her. By the time daylight comes, she has decided to accept their offer to become one of them because they have convinced her it’s a better world. In their world, they tell her, she can never get lost or feel abandoned again.

“Oh, God,” cried Flora, wriggling and hugging herself in the gloom, “I knew that was going to happen! I just knew it.”

In the final scene the mother comes back to the store with the police next morning. And in the children’s department, she sees a group of child mannequins and one of them resembles her daughter so much she goes into hysterics. But the police and the manager soothe her and assure her they will find her little girl before the day is over.

“Look at my arms,” said Flora, rubbing them up and down. “They’ve got goose bumps. Oh, honey, I hope this won’t give you bad dreams.”

The program made my heart long for Nonie. There were things about it to discuss that she would be so good at. But I would have to wait until bedtime to figure out what those things were.

X.

The way my days registered seemed to change after I moved into Nonie’s room. Events stopped marching forward in a straight, unselective procession and began clustering themselves into bunches, according to mood and subject matter. There were the things Flora said and did that slowly compiled a picture of what I could expect from her. There were my retreats into the sanctuary of my new room, where I seemed to merge with Nonie and came out thinking and speaking more like her. Was this shift in perceptions something my memory has imposed? Well, what is anybody’s memory but another narrative form?

The shift may have begun that morning, when I told Mrs. Jones I was growing up because I could now understand how her little Rosemary and my mother’s parents could have died in the same year.

Lying in Nonie’s high, roomy bed, freshly made up for my occupancy, I felt it was inviting me to stretch my legs and arms into its extra adult space and to observe life from a larger field of vision.

I was still thinking about the radio program. Flora had
ingested the story at its obvious level of horror and gone to bed triumphantly caressing her goose bumps and worrying that the story would give me bad dreams. For Flora, the little girl had been turned into a mannequin, the mother saw the resemblance and went to pieces, but the policemen talked her around to believing the child was still out there in the real world and that was the end of the scary program. But there were scarier levels of the story that could exist within the bounds of the everyday world. That’s what Nonie was good at: digging down to those levels. Though she was a skeptic and had nourished such leanings in me, she was a skeptic with great regard for the suggestive powers of the imagination. That is why she could tolerate Mrs. Jones’s respect for the supernatural and allow me to listen to the stories about little dead Rosemary and the uncle once I had assured her that I did not take the ghosts literally.

If Nonie had listened to the program about the little girl, she would have enjoyed the scariness as much as anyone, but she would have seen into other aspects that were just as scary.

“Don’t you wonder, Helen,” she might have mused, if she had been lying next to me, “what would have happened if the little girl had
turned down
the mannequins’ offer? After all, they didn’t force her, they didn’t just high-handedly turn her into one of themselves, did they? They gave her a choice and she chose to go back with them to a place where you can never get lost or feel abandoned again. Does such a place exist, do you think? And if it doesn’t exist, what options did she have other than to stop being human?”

FLORA’S BOX OF
clothes, sent by the ever-faithful Juliet Parker, arrived. As I watched her unpack her summer wardrobe with
little yips of recognition, I felt she was filling our house with more inferior stuff from Alabama. When the garments were all laid out on her bed in the Willow Fanning room, I realized that I had already seen her most presentable things: the suit she was wearing when she stepped off the train, the blue dress she had worn at Nonie’s funeral, and even the few changes of clothes she had allowed herself in the luggage crammed with the Alabama foodstuffs so I would have “proper meals” for the first weekend.

Then the contents of the box had to be ironed, with Flora’s commentaries.

“This skirt came from an old dress of your mother’s, Helen. I loved that dress on her. She gave it to me when she got tired of it, she always got tired of her favorite things, but when I got old enough to wear it my bustline was way bigger than hers, so Juliet cut off the top and made it into a skirt. Now,
this
skirt I made myself. It isn’t very successful, but I think it will be fine just around the house, don’t you?”

“Where else are we going to be but just around the house?”

Though nobody was forcing me to hang around for Flora’s ironing and chattering, I felt a perverse compulsion to watch the room become adulterated with her belongings. I had always known this front upstairs room in its uninhabited state, kept bare of anyone’s personal clutter, except for that of the occasional overnight guest. Who knew what possessions had surrounded the perfidious Willow Fanning, what flimsy or “not very successful” garments had to be whisked away from what surfaces before my sixteen-year-old father could recline upon them and continue falling in love with a woman twice his age? Nonie’s stories of those last days of Anstruther’s Lodge had been grim narratives of denouement and summing up; there was no place in them for asides about what anybody wore.

(“So there we all were, going on with our routines, in the summer of 1916. Your father was and always will be the age of the century. I was the majordomo of the operation, as by then we could afford a cook and a cleaning woman for our patients, which we called the Recoverers. In Doctor Cam’s first establishment we could take up to ten Recoverers, but when we moved up here to one thousand Sunset Drive we never had more than four; we didn’t need to by then, they were so well paying. They had graduated from whatever sanatorium they’d come here for in the first place, which is to say they were officially mended in lungs or mind or destructive habits, but weren’t yet ready or willing to go back to where they came from. Some of them ended up staying for years.