Gail Godwin - Flora

He put down his cup and saucer. “You favor her,” he said.

“Who?” I was not going to help him.

“Honora. Your grandmother. You must miss her a heap.”

I certainly wasn’t going to respond to that , even if he started to think I was a cretin.

“She wasn’t much older than you when we met. Oh, me, it was a bad day for her.” He uttered a wheezy, almost soundless laugh. “Hated me on sight. Well, I don’t blame her. But after a while we made friends. She ever talk about me?”

I could barely shake my head. My lips felt pasted against my teeth.

“I was nine years older. So there was a period there when she was still a child and I was already a man, but then that changed and we were more like equals. But she was always smarter than me. I knew that right from the start. Smart and high-tempered.” Another wheezy chuckle. “Oh, me.”

Oh, God , Flora, where are you?

“What grade are you in school?” Even a slow-witted child could answer that.

“I’ll be going into sixth.”

“Your daddy’s the principal, isn’t he?”

“He’s principal of the high school .”

“That’s what I thought. I was looking at some acreage that’s about to go on sale at the top of your hill this afternoon and thought I’d drop by and pay my respects to him. But your cousin says he’s over in Oak Ridge doing some important war work. How old is your father now?”

Never ask a person’s age, I had been taught practically from infancy. “My father is the age of the century,” I said, which would show that I knew his age without actually saying it.

“Oh no, he couldn’t be.”

This was too much. “I guess I ought to know my own father’s age,” I said as coldly as I could.

“With all due respect, young lady, you must have got your figures wrong.”

“My grandfather wrote a poem on the day my father was born. ‘Midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this December morn / a boy is born.’ It’s in a book upstairs in my grandfather’s consulting room. The date at the bottom of the poem says December the eighth, nineteen hundred. That’s my father’s birthday.”

This silenced the Old Mongrel. He looked gratifyingly flummoxed. And my small victory was that I still hadn’t said my father’s age.

Flora came back with the pot just as he was heaving himself up from the sofa. “Oh no, Mr. Quarles, you’re not leaving?”

“I better be getting on home, Miss Flora. My cataracts don’t operate so well when the dusk sets in.”

“I hope you and Helen got a little acquainted.”

“Oh, I would say we did.” Standing up, he was taller than I expected. “She takes after Honora all right.” Again the almost soundless, wheezy chuckle. “Well, you all have been very kind to me and I thank you for your hospitality. At least I got to meet the young lady and your nice friend, and I’m glad I could help with the Oldsmobile.”

Looking down at me he explained, “We jumped Honora’s batteries with my cables and gave Miss Flora her first driving lesson while you was having your nap. She needs to mash on the brake less, but she’s going to do real well. She’ll tell you all about it.”

Flora and I stood outside the kitchen door and watched the Old Mongrel’s big, sloping car with whitewalls cautiously bump down our driveway.

“That is the last Packard Clipper model they made before we entered the war,” said Flora dreamily.

“How do you know that?”

“Finn told me. He worked on cars like that before he joined the Army. He says Mr. Quarles must have money.”

“Of course he has. He got all the inheritance that was supposed to go to my grandmother. What I don’t understand is how he got inside our house.”

“Well, I invited him, Helen.”

“If I had been awake, that would never have been allowed to happen.”

“But he and your grandmother grew up together, honey.”

“Oh, grew up together,” I said bitterly. “People are always growing up together, according to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was nine years older than Nonie and my mother was twelve years older than you. You can’t ‘grow up together’ when there’s that much difference in your ages.”

“What on earth has gotten into you, Helen?” At last she had picked up on the fact that I was shaking with rage.

“My father would never have let him in the house.”

Now she blanched. “Why not?”

“ Because . He’s an old mongrel. That’s what my father calls him: the Old Mongrel.”

“What has he done to deserve that?”

“He’s a crook. He tried to bribe the funeral director to make him open Nonie’s casket.”

“Well, that’s not exactly a crook, honey. He probably wanted to see her one last time. You heard him say how much he thought of her.”

“He’s ill-bred. He asks people’s ages. He says ‘while you was having your nap.’ “

“Everyone doesn’t speak the King’s English, Helen. Mrs. Jones slips up on her grammar and you are very fond of her.”

“You leave her out of it. She stays in control of her days and Nonie admired her. And he’s a sneak and a bully and thinks nothing of taking what isn’t his.”

“Goodness, where did you get all that? I’ve never heard you even mention him before.”

“I got it from Nonie and my father. I never mentioned him because the last thing I expected was to take a nap and wake up and find you’d polluted our house.” I was starting to cry for the first time in front of Flora, and this made me all the more angry with her.

“Now, listen, Helen, that’s enough. I think you ought to go off by yourself and cool down before supper. We’re having spaghetti. I used up the last of Juliet’s herbs for the sauce.”

“I don’t want her fucking sauce and I’m sick of eating! I’m sick of you! I can’t wait till you leave!”

I remember feeling, after my blowup that Sunday, that I could still give myself credit for some adult restraint. I hadn’t actually cried. I hadn’t hit. In the past, even the recent past, I had sometimes hit Nonie in aggravation, but during this summer I had never once hit Flora. Okay, I had lashed out verbally in a childish way—and gotten a child’s satisfaction from the instant response—but I knew I could still reap some longer-term benefits if I apologized. I wasn’t really sorry about using my father’s worst swearword. It was a thing men said, but if a female used it sparingly it had great shock value. I had shocked Flora. Then I had hurt her by saying I was sick of her and would be glad when she was gone. But though Flora was easy to hurt, she was also an easy forgiver. When I went off to cool down, as instructed by her, I used that time by myself to compose my scene of contrition.

I knew even while screaming at Flora that I was going to have to apologize later, because my goal was to get along with her on the surface for the rest of the summer while keeping my serious schemes to myself. First, though, I checked myself over for wounds and then laid out the pluses and minuses of the afternoon. I had first done this after Flora’s one outburst—if you could call it that—when I had been snotty about refusing to send my picture to the Alabama people, and she had lost control and “told me things” about my mother’s selfishness and cruelty. What I had lost that other day was my illusion that Flora adored my mother unreservedly, but what I had gained was valuable information as to what Lisbeth had really been like and the realization that I wouldn’t be sorry to behave with her cold expediency under similar circumstances. It felt gratifying being allied with my mother in this way.