Gail Godwin - Flora

“It was the corn bread,” said Flora. “He smelled the corn bread and it reminded him of his mother. He told me that after we had talked awhile. Isn’t that touching?”

I filled my mouth with the heaped forkful and looked out the window.

“Oh, and he asked if your father was interested in selling the Oldsmobile. He wants it for his wife.”

“His wife! She doesn’t even live here!”

“No, but he said she had always admired Mrs. Anstruther’s touring car. He was thinking he might drive it down to her at the beach and come back on the bus. If she had such a car, Serena—isn’t that a nice name?—might be tempted to come home more. I gather there have been some differences between them, but, you know, Helen, differences sometimes get ironed out over time. Look at your uncle Sam and aunt Garnet in Alabama, getting remarried after being separated for twenty-six years. Wouldn’t it be sweet if Mrs. Anstruther’s car were to be the means of their reconciliation?”

“My father isn’t going to sell my grandmother’s car so the Crumps can get reconciled.”

“Of course not, honey. I only meant… And besides, it’s up to your father. I told him that.”

When did remorse fall into disfavor? It was sometime during the second half of my life. As a child, I knelt next to Nonie in church and said alongside her sedate contralto: the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable . Then, for a long time I didn’t go to church, and when I next said the General Confession it had been watered down to we are truly sorry and we humbly repent . If someone had really done you an ill turn and later came to you and said, “I am truly sorry,” would that mean as much to you as “the burden of it has been intolerable to me”?

Remorse is wired straight to the heart. “Stop up the access and passage to remorse,” Lady Macbeth bids the dark spirits, “that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose.”

Remorse went out of fashion around the same time that “Stop feeling guilty,” and “You’re too hard on yourself,” and “You need to love yourself more” came into fashion.

“The summer I turned eleven,” I might begin, and often have begun, “I was left in the care of my late mother’s first cousin. She was twenty-two. It was for the most part a boring, exasperating summer. Such an isolated summer would not be possible today. We had the radio and the mail and the telephone (though few people wrote or called) and the woman who came to clean on Tuesdays and the man who delivered our groceries. Most days my feelings fell somewhere on the scale between bored / protected and bored / superior. But there were also times when I felt I had to fight to keep from losing the little I had been left with, including my sense of myself. Maybe I fought too hard. Anyway, the summer ended terribly (grievously?) and I have wondered ever since how much of it I caused.”

After I have furnished some specifics, I am always told, in one way or another, that I am being too hard on myself. “You were a child, not even an adolescent yet. You had lost your model and your bulwark and were clinging to your foundations, such as you had been taught to perceive them, and you were ready to fight anyone who threatened them.”

Or: “At eleven, your cerebral cortex was still growing and your cognitive powers hadn’t finished developing. You were still floating in a continuum of possibilities and discovering what was in your power to do. But you weren’t yet adept at foreseeing the consequences of what was in your power to do.”

Or: “Then was then. Now is now. Put all that behind you, accept the person you have become through your particular gifts and failures. It is all flow, anyway. Disruption and regeneration. Forgive that child and go forth and sin no more. At least, try to do no harm in the years remaining to you.”

Remorse derives from the Latin remordere : to vex, disturb, bite, sting again (the “again” is important). It began as a transitive verb, as in “my sinful lyfe dost me remord.”

But now I say alongside Thomas à Kempis: “I would far rather feel remorse than know how to define it.”

MRS. JONES LIMPEDin on Tuesday with her right ankle taped to twice its size. She had turned it while out walking, she said. Flora made a huge fuss over her and begged her to sit down and let her make her a nice breakfast. “And then I can help with the cleaning, Mrs. Jones. Under your supervision, of course.”

“Thank you, I’ve had my breakfast, and it don’t hurt nearly as bad as it looks. It’s only twisted, not sprained. I’ll be able to do my work just fine.”

“Well, I can certainly do my room and change my linens.”

“That’s thoughtful of you, but I would get all turned around if I didn’t stick to my usual system. I’ve got to the place where my routine more or less runs me.”

“At least let me make you a cup of tea,” implored Flora.

“Oh, I’ve got my thermos of tea.”

“Well, just please call me if you need anything,” said Flora. “Will you at least promise me that?”

Mrs. Jones said she would. She had finally stopped calling her ma’am after Flora’s repeated injunctions to call her Flora and now respectfully abstained from calling her anything at all.

Flora said she would work on her lesson plans upstairs until Mrs. Jones came up at noon to do the top floor. Naturally we couldn’t play fifth-grade class when she was in the house.

I went outside to bide my time in the garage while Mrs. Jones scrubbed the kitchen floor and went over her life. I knew almost to the minute when it would be time to join up with her in Nonie’s old room to change my sheets. The car had become my designated place for thinking about Finn and planning the details of his moving in with us. Also, I felt the car was more in need of my company and protection since the grocer had expressed his horrible intention to Flora.

Mrs. Jones told me she had turned her foot in the dark walking back from the lake after the Fourth of July fireworks. “It didn’t start hurting till I got home. It throbbed and swole up something awful but I kept my feet elevated as much as I could.”

“You didn’t go to the doctor ?”

“No, I could tell it wasn’t broken or sprained.”

“How could you tell?”

“You can tell a right smart lot about your body when you get to my age.”

“Did you do that remembrance thing for the little girl?”

“I did. Every time a pretty firework went up over the lake I did.”

“But there must have been lots of pretty fireworks.”

“I waited for the ones Rosemary would have thought pretty. The ones in color, or the whirly ones.”

“And did you say the thing aloud?”

“I did, even though some folks looked at me funny. Every time I said it, ‘Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten,’ I thought of that little girl, on her way to camp, but her and the aunt stopping for that swim. When I was walking back to the car after the fireworks, I stumbled in the dark and turned my ankle.”

“But you carried out Rosemary’s wishes.” I aimed for the bright side. We had finished Nonie’s bed and I wanted to keep the conversation going as long as possible.

“Well—” Mrs. Jones began, but could not go on. The trembly corners of her mouth seemed to be fighting against the stoic slabs of her cheeks and making them twitch.

I made smoothing motions with my palm on Nonie’s newly made bed and lowered my eyes. I knew better than to prod Mrs. Jones with my imperious what? which worked so well on Flora. I waited, wondering if I would at last see this stolid woman cry.