Perfect Reader (30 page)

That night, her mother made dinner in her father’s kitchen, Flora pointing out where things were and leaning against the butcher block as her mother cooked. The fridge was well stocked, but Joan did not say how shocked she was to find anything more than shriveling limes and flat tonic water—the staples of Flora’s city life. She simply looked pleased and eagerly set to work. She would not be staying over in the house, but with friends in town, and driving back to the city in the morning, one night within the Darwin limits still her absolute maximum.

Over dinner, they did not talk of him. Nor did they talk of themselves. They talked of things they’d seen or read or heard. The world beyond. Her mother talked of politics, and Flora talked for the first time of her reading, of what she’d learned in Carpenter’s class, of the books she’d read alone at night in her father’s house, recounting not whole plots, but exquisite moments, those moments that when you read them, you know you will keep forever.

Her mother did not ask her what all this meant, this sudden reading, or observe that with her father gone she could now do all the things she’d once felt were his. There was no talk of future plans, or of memories of the past.

At the end of the meal, her mother said only, “Thanks for letting me do this for you.”

And Flora said, “Anytime.”

And then her mother added, “Wherever you go next, Flo, promise me it won’t be Mongolia.”

And Flora promised. “It won’t be Mongolia,” she said.

23

Commencement

I
T WAS
D
ARWIN’S COMMENCEMENT,
the official, academy-sanctioned moment to get on with it, to grow up. The streets in town were clogged with parents, grandparents, and disgruntled siblings, and even as far as Flora’s father’s street, cars with strange plates and windows smeared with boastful college stickers lined the sidewalks. The banner above Pleasant Street had for the last week congratulated the graduates;
REMEMBER,
it commanded,
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE DARWIN.
Tents bloomed on quads and lawns, the President’s House in full entertainment swing, preparing for the forced march that is the end of the academic year—the trustees, the alums, the faculty parties.

Flora was dreaming of the President’s House again. Not quite Manderlay, but it did this in phases—took over her unconscious mind, bossy and self-important, such dreams, at least, recognizably her own. The night before, she dreamt she was hosting a party there, the President’s House hers to be host in again. Everyone attended: Georgia and her father, her mother and Cynthia, Madeleine and Ray and Dr. Berry, Esther and Paul, Sidney Carpenter, Mrs. J. and Betsy. The party was a success, it hummed with life, and Georgia was a mother, her baby learning to talk, learning to say Flora’s name. This was important, and Flora couldn’t help wishing the baby would never learn another name, or not for a while. Strangers danced. Flora cried and tried not to cry. She knew it was her last night in the house; she was leaving and this was a good-bye party, though she did not know where she was going. She just knew she was to spend this last night there alone. “Be funny,” her parents said, and she knew this meant she was supposed to speak, but she had nothing to say.

“It’s sad, leaving,” she told Georgia as they said their good-byes, and Georgia said, “It’s moving on. It’s exciting,” and Flora felt annoyed—what did Georgia know about good-byes?

Soon the mansion was empty, and Flora walked from room to room, shutting the lights; there were so many lights in so many rooms, and she was scared and alone with the knowing that no one else quite understood. She was a ghost, like the men in the portraits who came alive in the games she and Georgia played when they were young. And yet she was at the same time proud of her aloneness, the profoundness of her solitude something of an accomplishment.

In the morning, she woke early and called Cynthia and asked if she could swing by after the show was over, once the Pompous Circumstance had exhausted itself. After weeks of logistics, plans were in place.

Cynthia asked, “Is everything okay, Flora? It always seems a major event when you pick up the telephone.”

“Everything is fine,” Flora said. “I’ll see you later.”

Flora resisted the pull of the hammock, listless in the cool shade of the old maples, and set to work assembling more boxes, stuffing them as full as she could manage—so many boxes, tidy and awkward. Arriving at her father’s house had not been moving. That had been fleeing—running away home. But leaving now was moving-packing not just a body bag but boxes, too. There would be large men, and a large truck. All moves brought back all other moves. She made herself keep working. She’d already gone through and sent the rarer books to the Cross College Library, and she tried not to look through these, her books, as she packed them, tried not to peek inside to see the reliable initials, or when he’d last read
Paradise Lost
or
What Maisie Knew
. She’d have time to linger when she unpacked; she had a lifetime to learn what he had known, or to choose not to learn. But of course she did look—studying his marginalia, the subtle checks in margins, the occasional exclamation point or question mark, the mysterious underlinings.

She took her final inventory of the house. There was much she was leaving behind—her father’s clothes still hanging in his closet. Perhaps she should have given those away. She packed her clothing into the body bag, the same things going in that had come out, as if she’d reached the end of a long, thrifty vacation. She closed his typewriter, the old Smith Corona portable with its round green keys, into its heavy metal case. It was her last day in Darwin, but she did not burn anything in the fireplace as her mother had done as her final protest against the town, against the house and what her life had become in it. She thought she might bury her father’s ashes in the garden, but the only shovel she could find was the one she’d used to clear snow from the steps, square-headed, and best for scraping, not digging. In the garage, she found a neat wooden box of gardening tools, including a trowel, clean but its wooden handle well worn—Cynthia’s tools. A trowel might work, the soil soft and damp and smelling of spring, smelling of either life or death. And one didn’t have to dig too deep to bury a tin of ashes. She could bury them with his manuscript—there was a depraved poetry in that. As gestures went, though, it would be purely symbolic, her version being only a copy—one, now, of several. Earlier that week, Flora had gone to the English Department to make four copies. She needed help, needed professional opinions. When Pat Jenkins had seen what it was, she’d shaken her head, for the first time not disapproving, but awed.

A strange practice, burial. Difficult not to feel self-consciously tragic—Greek, even—at the thought of burying your father’s ashes in his backyard. Would she rend her garments and howl at the heavens? Gouge out her eyes with the trowel? Months ago, Flora had been writing gardening stories as though they were works of fantasy, as though gardening occurred only in the world of fiction, in her imagination. Now Cynthia’s garden was coming to life all around her—long-eared irises, and tall burgundy and orange tulips below the pinky milk of the dogwood tree. She thought of her father’s poem, of watching Cynthia planting bulbs. Of his watercolor of the image. No, Flora would wait. It was
her
garden, after all. Depriving her father’s lover of one memorial would have to be enough.

Cynthia arrived straight from the festivities, her green robe draped over an arm and neat little beads of sweat across her nose.

“What’s all this?” she asked, putting her reading glasses on to examine the boxes piled in the kitchen. “Your way of telling me you’re leaving town, Flora?”

“Yes, I’m leaving.”

“And where will you go?”

“Back to the city for now. Then, I don’t know. I have means. I’m able-bodied. Anything might happen. I might buy myself a house, or an apartment, or, who knows?”

“But you’re leaving? You’re selling this house?”

“Yes, I am. By the way, do you have a dollar?”

“What?”

“A dollar—do you have one on you?”

Cynthia, flustered, fetched her wallet from her bag. “No, just a five. Or—wait, is four quarters all right?”

“Yes, perfect.” Flora pointed to the papers on the counter. “Now all I need is your signature.”

Cynthia stared at her. She hadn’t yet looked down at the papers, but she’d already begun to cry. When she saw the deed, she released a loud sob and covered her eyes with her hands. “It’s mine?” she said. She put her hand against the wall and breathed.

“It’s yours,” Flora said, and she waved her arms overhead and around the room in a buoyant little girl’s dance. Paul, with his vast experience of Darwin’s real estate divorces, had been helpful. His last act on behalf of her father’s estate, his making of amends. “It’s all yours,” Flora repeated.

Of course, it wasn’t what Cynthia wanted most of all. But it was something.

Cynthia was still crying, but her mouth moving toward happiness now, too, dueling weather patterns across her face. She grabbed the pen and signed the papers.

“Except for the gold chair. I’m taking that. And the Shaker chair,” Flora added. “And the books. The books are mine. And a few other things. But we can go through all that later.” Later there would be many other questions, much to resolve or leave without resolution. “And the roof. You’ll need to replace the roof. Sooner rather than later.”

Cynthia nodded and laughed, as though it were only more good news. “What about Larks?”

“Larks is coming with me.”

On Cynthia’s face, a surge of disappointment, or surprise. It would never be enough. “He used to terrorize the cats,” she said. “They’ll be relieved.”

“You can visit him, of course. We can easily arrange that.”

“And you’ll come visit me, too, won’t you, Flora? You’ll stay here sometimes, when you come to Darwin?”

“Sure.”

“I can keep your room just as it is.”

“God no. Please don’t,” Flora said. “Change the room. Change everything. Do that crazy thing you do to the walls. The living room could use it.”

Hers was not a pure benevolence. It was like the time once, on a rainy day in the city, when she’d watched as one young man stole a bag of umbrellas another young man was selling on the street. The salesman yelled out, “Hey! Who took that bag?” And Flora kept walking. How exhilarating for the thief, and how shaming, off to sell the umbrellas he had stolen. She felt both, too, the exhilaration and the shame. What she had wasn’t really hers to give. And she was willing to concede it might not work out. It might not work out for any of them. But there was a kind of hopeless optimism in what was happening.

Cynthia threw the pen on the counter and returned the little pirouette. And they stood together in the kitchen, smiling but not quite looking at each other.

Acknowledgments

While there may be in life no perfect readers, I have been very lucky to have had the help of many of the best readers in the world. It is not an exaggeration to say that without their devotion and talents,
In Darwin’s Gardens
would not have found its way into the world.

Sidney Carpenter, Ira Rubenstein, and James Wood were three vital and early readers of these poems who knew all the right questions to ask, and, more, could answer any question I put to them along the way. My father’s editor, Bill Curtis, believed in the book from the start, promised to do right by it, and kept his word. My mother, Joan Dempsey, offered me bracing support and generosity of spirit as I struggled to do the work I only wish my father could have been alive to do.

Most of all, it is thanks to the boundless energy and sheer heart of Cynthia Reynolds, to whom this collection has been dedicated, that these poems now make their way to the hands of new readers, all perfectly imperfect in their own ways, but I hope and trust, according to the strongest wishes of Lewis Dempsey, each and every one understanders.

Flora Dempsey

a cognizant original v5 release october 06 2010

AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe thanks to many who have lent wisdom and offered comfort throughout the writing of this book. To Jennifer Carlson, insightful, wry, and steadfast, who took a chance on the novel before it was one, read more drafts than is decent, and made the book better every time. To Deborah Garrison, intellectually rigorous, passionate, and sensitive, the editor of my dreams. And to Caroline Zancan, who has made the way smooth. To Rivka Galchen, Ella Georgiades, Alena Graedon, Nellie Hermann, Karen Thompson, and Cora Weimer-Hodes, adored friends, who read earlier versions with generosity, grit, and invaluable intelligence. To my humorous and talented teachers at Columbia’s Writing Division, who saw the novel through its awkward stages. To the brilliant Professor Edward Tayler, from whom I borrowed and no doubt bastardized the notion of the reader as understander. To our incomparable critic James Wood, from whom I borrowed several ideas to create the character of James Wood. To Claire Tomalin, whose
Thomas Hardy
helped me to work out who the poet was to Lewis Dempsey. To my family, dazzling and true, for their fierce belief, which at the crucial moment meant everything. And especially to Matt, my home, who has given this book and its author more love and care than either deserved—thank you.