Flora (21 page)

As we went down to supper, I had to congratulate myself for deflecting Flora from her trash talk and staving off those ready tears. There had not been a single tear shed. I felt like a proud parent who, after hard work, sees her child growing into sociability and self-control.

XXII.

It was the last Sunday in July. Then there would be next Sunday, and two days after that, August seventh, would be my birthday. My father had not written or phoned since he was having his sandwich and pickle out at that lake. I chose to interpret his silence as meaning that he planned to surprise me by simply showing up on my birthday.

Today was a sultry, overcast Sunday like the Sunday Flora and I had taken the taxi to church and heard the awful news about Brian. And then Father McFall had driven us home and we hadn’t been down the mountain since.

But at least it wasn’t raining, which meant that Finn would be coming to fix the gutter in the afternoon.

Lately I had been composing scenes where my father and Finn would meet, maybe as soon as my birthday. I made myself do it two ways. First I had to imagine my father finding something in Finn to scorn, and then, before I could allow myself to go on, I had to figure out what that thing would be. Finn’s orange spikes had grown out into an acceptable head of hair, he looked less like a wraithlike outsider since he had gotten some sun weeding the old lady’s garden; and the only time he had
been really silly was when he had danced for joy at the bottom of the crater, and nobody had seen that but me. Finn was friendly, but not “familiar,” which my father couldn’t stand in people, and he spoke well, even with his funny
will we
’s and
a-tall, a-tall
’s. He showed no signs of having been “a mentaler,” the type of person who would escape from a hospital and wrap himself naked around a tree trunk in order to exchange himself for a dead friend.

Having gone through the negatives and discounted them one by one, I could then move on to the Finn who would catch my father’s interest, charm him, and eventually earn his respect. This was a much pleasanter proposition, and I approached it so well that I kept getting excited and losing my place and having to start over. The consummation point I worked toward in these scenes ended with the two of them (with myself present, of course) in animated dialogue, each at his best: my father witty and slightly world-weary but without the sarcasm and Finn sweet and caring in his masculine way, without any hints of mental problems. And then Finn would say something, maybe about me, and my father would say, “Look here, why don’t you join forces with us in this crumbling old pile? We’ve got lots of empty rooms if you don’t mind a few ghostly
encumbrances
.” “Ah, if you mean the Recoverers,” Finn would say, “Helen has told me about them and I wouldn’t mind them a-tall, a-tall. I’d be honored, Mr. Anstruther.” “Please,” my father would say, “call me Harry.” And then they’d toast it with cocktails that I would mix. Maybe just one for Finn, if he was still on the dry. But you needed a cocktail for a toast.

And then the whole project had collapsed in a miserable heap because I had forgotten to include Flora. Flora would still be
here on my birthday. She had to be somewhere in the picture, and if she were my father couldn’t be asking Finn to live with us yet. Also who could predict how she might derail things or what unwelcome bit of information she might blurt out at any time? My imaginative powers had made a serious miscalculation in timing and logistics, and I was disgusted with myself.

AT LUNCH, FLORA
said, “Listen, Helen, what should we do about supper?”

“We’re still eating lunch.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Finn is coming to fix the downspout.”

“So?”

“Well, I haven’t asked him to supper.”

“You
haven’t
?” I had just assumed she had, even though there hadn’t been her usual agonizings over which Juliet-dish to prepare. “Why ever not?” (One of Nonie’s pet phrases.)

“Well, I didn’t want him to think we’re running after him.”

“Why on earth would he think that?” I was stalling for time, Nonie-like, until I figured out how to get the upper hand.

“Because … Oh, I don’t know. You think we should ask him?”

“Oh, no. Just let him come and fix our gutters for free, and then say, ‘Oh, thanks, bye now. Hope you’re not hungry or anything.’ “

“Oh, dear.” The tears were mobilizing.

“So he’ll climb on his motorcycle and ride away thinking,
I wonder what I did to make them not like me anymore
.”

“I’m going to call him right now.”

“Now, that
would
look like you’re running after him. Besides, the store’s closed on Sunday. Just wait until he comes this afternoon and say we’re having a light supper, nothing fancy, but he’s welcome to stay.”

“But, he’ll be all sweaty and might feel he should wash.” She seemed to have given this previous thought.

“Well, let him wash here. We certainly have enough bathrooms.”

“In that case, what should we have?”

“You’ll think of something. You always do.”

BUT FINN ALREADY
had supper plans. Miss Adelaide, the old lady who was losing her memory and had bruises from head to toe, was back from the hospital and was making him fried chicken and waffles to thank him for taking care of her cat and her garden.

“Oh, chicken and waffles, I can’t compete with that,” said Flora, folding her arms and looking away to hide her mortification.

“Don’t be like that, love. If I had known—”

“No, it’s my fault,” Flora eagerly rushed on. “I didn’t ask earlier because I was afraid you would get sick of seeing us, but then Helen said she wanted you.”

“I did
not
.”

“Ah,” Finn teased me, “so you
didn’t
want me.”

“That is not what I meant.” I could have killed Flora for getting me into this trap. Why did she have to proclaim her every self-doubt from the rooftops? Now both of them were anxiously regarding me: the child who might fly off the handle. Well, I would show them. “He
is
going to get sick of us,” I scolded Flora,
“if we won’t let him get on with what he came to do.” Toward Finn I was all business. “Come on,” I said, “I’ll show you where the extension ladder is.”

But once the two of us were in the garage, I relented. He stopped to run a hand lovingly down a rear fender of Nonie’s car. “Nineteen thirty-three Oldsmobile Tudor touring car,” he said like an incantation. “We won’t see its like again.”

“I wish we could drive it,” I said.

“Well, why can’t you?”

“Because Flora never learned to drive and I’m too young to get a license.”

“Are you saying you can drive then?”

“No, but if somebody would teach me I would have a head start.”

“Flora never learned to drive?” he asked just as I was getting ready to add that maybe he would teach me.

“None of her people in Alabama learned. They couldn’t afford a car.”

“That’s no cause a-tall. A lot of folks drive who don’t own automobiles.”

“The school she really wanted rejected her because she couldn’t drive.” Might as well show interest in what interested him, since I had missed out on my chance.

“Ah, was she sorely let down?”

“She cried, but that’s what she always does. She said she wished she had told them she could drive and then had someone teach her before school started.”

“What a shame,” Finn said angrily.

“But she’s real excited about the school that does want her. And some man she met at her interview wrote and said he’d be glad to teach her to drive.”

“I’ll bet he would,” Finn said. “Has anyone been charging the battery?”

“I wasn’t sure how.”

“Turn the key and let the motor run is all it takes.”

“I think the battery is dead,” I said quickly because he was starting to look annoyed with me. “In fact, I’m sure it’s dead.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because a man came and tried, but it wouldn’t start.” I had almost said the man was Mr. Crump, but Finn might check. Let it just be a man.

“That’s a shame,” said Finn.

“My father will see to it when he gets back,” I assured him.

“Well, it’s still a bleeding shame,” said Finn.

I helped him carry the long extension ladder, which he set up at the needy corner of the house with a great deal of shaking and rattling, and then when he had fastened on his tool belt and climbed to the top, Flora and I did our part by lifting up the downspout pipe and holding it steady until he had reattached it to its gutter.

“That should do it, ladies,” he said.

“That’s all?” said Flora, looking woefully up at him. “You mean you’re finished already?”

“With that little task I am. But while we’ve got the ladder up, will I have a look at the other gutters all around the house? I could bail out some of the gunk while I’m about it.”

“Well, I—Helen, what do you think? It’s your house.”

“That would be really nice of you,” I said to Finn on the ladder. “If you’re sure you have the time.”

“Oh, I have. Miss Adelaide doesn’t want me till half past six. What I’ll need, though, is something to put the gunk in.”

“I’ll get a bucket,” cried Flora, already running for the house.

“Are you going to need
two
people?” I called up to him.

“Come again?”

“Will you need two of us for the bucket part? I’ve got something I need to do in the house.”

“You run on then, darling. Your cousin and I will manage fine.”

“Will you come and say good-bye before you leave?”

“Sure I will. Where will I find you?”

“I’ll be upstairs. It’s easy. You turn left at the top of the stairs and it’s the first room. I’ll be working in there. Will you come when you’ve finished the gutters?”

“I will. But it might be an hour or so. Is that all right?”

“Perfect. I have something I want to show you.”

AT LAST, AT
last
, I thought, triumphantly racing up the stairs—stairs Finn would be climbing for the first time in “an hour or so”—
I am learning how to get people to do as I want
. Flora didn’t count. She was too easy, too much like someone my own age. No, not even that. She was easier than wily Annie Rickets; easier than Rachel Huff, whose sullen moods somehow insulated her like a black cloud from the demands of others; easier, even, than tranquil Brian Beale, so congenial to play with but stubbornly set in his ways when it came to what he wanted us to play.

It was almost ready, the Devlin Patrick Finn room: the room that had not been named for Starling Peake because he had let us down, the room my mother had chosen to lie and read in when she was expecting me. The drawers of the old cheval
dresser had been emptied and lined with paper (the perfectly good extension cord, the sealed pack of cards, and the two buckeyes placed neatly in the top drawer for Finn); I had cleaned its tilting glass with vinegar and newspaper, the way I had seen Mrs. Jones do it, and I had shined the mirror above the sink, where Finn’s pointy face would look back at him when he shaved. (“We’ll need to get a desk or a table in here,” I heard myself telling him, “but we waited to see which you preferred for your artwork.” “One thing this old pile has plenty of,” my father might add, if he was accompanying us, “is furniture. You’ll trip over it and bust your head if you’re not careful.”)

If only I hadn’t told Finn, “I’ve got something I need to do in the house.” He probably thought I had to go to the bathroom. I should have said, “I’ve got some work I need to do in the house.” But aside from that I felt I had developed my social arts this summer, even in all our isolation, and had to concede that Flora had contributed to my progress. Flora, however easy, had provided me with a round-the-clock living human specimen to practice on.

There was one thing left to be done before Finn came upstairs, and it turned out to be harder than I had expected. I wanted the bed to be back at the window, the way it was in my mother’s time, but in my impatience and frustration in moving it I made an ugly gash in the floor. I dragged my father’s oriental rug over it, but that left a big square of bare floor that was lighter than the rest because it had been under the rug for so long. There was nothing to do but drag in the other oriental rug from the other Recoverer’s room to cover the naked square. The result was a success, but it had worn me out. I lay down on my mother’s old bed by the window, thinking of the poor lady in
the poem who had to watch life through a mirror, and felt myself sinking alarmingly toward a childish nap. But that would be all right, too. Finn would come up and wake me, like that day when I crouched like a catatonic by the side of the road. “Hello, hello,” he would say, bending over the bed. “Is anyone there?”

XXIII.

Once, when I was five, I took an afternoon nap and woke up and found things had been done without me. Before the nap, Nonie and I had been sitting on the sofa coloring together. I always did the characters in the picture and allowed her to color in the background, which she did in such a way that enhanced my artwork. It was a superior coloring book, or at least I’m remembering it that way. The paper was smooth, not porous, the pages lay flat, and the pictures were from myths, fairy tales, and the Bible. The picture was on the right side and its story was on the left side. We always read the story first so we could get an idea of how the picture ought to be colored in. I don’t remember the picture we had finished before Nonie said, “Someone looks sleepy,” and walked me to my room, but I remember some of the pictures in the book. There was Cinderella and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Noah receiving the dove telling him the coast was clear, and Ruth and Naomi, and Joseph in his coat of many colors (but not what his brothers were going to do to him on the trip) and Aladdin and Pandora, and Psyche holding a candle over Cupid while he slept. The coloring book was called
A
Color Book of Old Stories
. I still look for it sometimes online, but have never found anything remotely like it. For a while I had this fantasy that I would suddenly hit on it,
A Color Book of Old Stories
, and order it, and when it arrived I would get some crayons and turn to the page in question and redeem my lost colors.