Gail Godwin: Flora

“Flora is my wife’s first cousin. She’s training to be a teacher, but she’s hardly a fancy governess. I thought it would be better for Helen to stay in her own home. She’s had enough upheaval as it is.”

“Wasn’t she that emotional girl reading your mother’s letters to everyone after the funeral? Well, you know best, but if for some reason it doesn’t work out with Flora, my offer stands.”

“That’s very generous of you, Lorena, but I see no reason why things shouldn’t work out.”

The week with the Huffs turned out to be a torment. Everyone had a schedule but me. Rachel and her mother were on the tennis court before breakfast. I lay in bed hearing their back-and-forth thwock s, interspersed with Lorena Huff’s criticisms and Rachel’s sullen groans. Then the cook started her breakfast sounds, and here came the gardener’s truck rattling up the drive, and after that began the various parcel deliveries, which seemed to go on all day. Ladies arrived to see Lorena Huff, and they sat on the screened porch and tinkled ice and planned charitable events. Twice a week a man came to the house to teach Rachel piano (she was on John Thompson’s book two), and every afternoon at three a mannish woman in jodhpurs drove Rachel away in a jeep for her riding lesson.

“I want you to treat our house like a resort,” Lorena Huff said. “Swim in the pool, have little talks with Rachel, and show up for meals. We’ll take care of the rest. I want you to consider Rachel and me as your family until that cousin of your mother’s gets here.”

Wasn’t it a contradiction in terms for a family member to treat her home as a resort? But what made me far unhappier than my lack of any schedule was the sense that life at Old One Thousand was going on without me. It had a schedule and needed someone there to register it. I did my best to patrol its rooms and porches in spirit. Nonie seemed always to be there waiting, just around a corner or on the other side of a door. Sometimes the Recoverers were there, the ones from her stories, discussing their rates of improvement as the sun passed over the house. Around three o’clock this time of year, as Rachel was being driven away for her riding lesson, they would be gathering up their books and cards and migrating from the south porch to the west porch. And in the background, doing whatever he did in his consulting room (sometimes he wrote poetry: “… ’midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this December morn / a boy is born,” he had begun his ode on the occasion of my father’s birth), presided the watchful spirit of my grandfather Doctor Cam.

Rachel and I swam and had I-bet-you-can’t-do-this contests in the pool while her mother lay in the sun in her two-piece bathing suit, her skinny brown midriff baking to a crisp, her face concealed by a picture hat, leafing through magazines and turning down pages when she saw something she wanted. Rachel and I had a thermos of cold lemonade, and Rachel’s mother had her own thermos, which Rachel said was “spiked,” and eventually Lorena Huff would rise from her deck chair, wiggle her fingers at us coyly, and sway unsteadily toward the house.

Every morning, Rachel and I crunched down the sparkling white drive to the mailbox, Rachel toeing up as much gravel as she could, and by the time we had walked back with the mail, Rachel would have gotten in at least two of her embarrassing questions. These ran the gamut from “Which is worse, having your mother or your grandmother die?” to “Don’t you want to know who your father will marry to look after you?”

I grew more desolate as the week went on. I felt I was neglecting an important duty and losing more of my identity every hour I stayed apart from the rhythms of Old One Thousand. There were times when I was sure that, if I could be there at that very moment, Nonie would find a way to speak to me, and maybe even to appear, which made me all the more desolate.

Flora was to arrive on a midmorning Saturday train from Birmingham, after a long layover in Columbia, and Mrs. Huff kept warning me that the poor girl would probably be exhausted after sitting up all night and would need to rest before beginning her duties. “Your mother’s cousin is welcome to come back here, Helen. We’ll keep the resort going for you two awhile longer. We can provide everything you need.”

“Thank you, but I really need to get home.” Lorena Huff meant well, but I was starting to feel bludgeoned by her hospitality.

The Flora who emerged from the train looked uncharacteristically in charge. In a simple gray suit sprigged with tiny white flowers, her hair secured in a businesslike knot beneath a little hat with a demure veil, she could pass for the fancy governess Mrs. Huff had accused my father of hiring. I could see Lorena Huff revising her estimate of the emotional girl she had seen reading Nonie’s letters at the funeral reception.

I ran to Flora and flung my arms around her.

“My goodness!” she exclaimed, surprised. “You seem glad to see me.”

“Let’s go straight home ,” I hissed into her neck.

“Well, of course,” she said. “Where else would we go?”

“Just don’t accept any invitation, okay?”

“Okay,” she repeated, giving my shoulders an encouraging little shake before stepping over to greet Mrs. Huff and Rachel. The dreaded invitation was offered, and I was impressed at how maturely Flora got out of it.

“No, I’m not at all exhausted,” she said. “I brought Mrs. Anstruther’s letters to keep me company during the trip. They always inspire me. I read them over, and it was like hearing her voice tell me what to do next. Helen’s grandmother and I corresponded for six years, you know. You’ve taken such good care of Helen, Mrs. Huff. Just look how brown these girls are! But now I want to get her right home and settle us into our summer routine.”

However, Flora’s arrival that day was to mark the high point of my faith in her.

My one solace during the week at the Huffs’ had been planning the historical tour of the house I would give Flora the day she arrived. I had played it back and forth in my head, room by room, hearing my own narrating voice. First thing, we’d head straight up to settle her in her room. Flora had slept in this room on her two previous visits to this house, first when she stayed on after my mother’s funeral and then back in March, when she came up for Nonie’s funeral. She had already been told we called this upstairs front room, which opened out on the west porch, the Willow Fanning room, after a Recoverer who had stayed in it a year and a half while convalescing from a nervous breakdown. But there were other layers to reveal, the sort you wouldn’t tell a regular guest, not even a cousin visiting for family funerals. I had planned to drop a few hints about my father’s attachment to Willow Fanning when he was sixteen, maybe even going so far as to foreshadow their ill-fated elopement. My father shouldn’t mind, he was “an old guy” now, as he kept saying, and if he did mind, well, too bad. It was he who had chosen to make Flora an intimate of our family for the summer. I would tell just enough to make her feel she was being inducted into a private family story, and if she proved a worthy listener I would dole out more details. I might also allude to other noteworthy Recoverers on Flora’s first day. The point was to draw her into the ways of Old One Thousand and make her my ally in keeping things going the way they had always been. And what better start than Flora’s having just reread Nonie’s letters on the train!

But Flora completely derailed my plans by making us stop first in the kitchen, where she proceeded to unpack her luggage. Out of an old carpetbag, whose threadbare state had embarrassed me when Lorena Huff was lifting it into the back of her station wagon, came a sack of flour, filled mason jars, and an entire ham. And then from her suitcase Flora parted a meager layer of personal garments and lifted out a sack of cornmeal, which she held in one arm like a baby while she plucked out tea bags, a tin cake box, and some wax paper parcels of what looked like dead grass. With a sigh of fulfillment she deposited these items on the counter.