Gail Godwin - Flora

“It looks like a present,” Finn said.

“I know, but—”

“It might be for you. For your birthday.”

“But there’s no card.”

“Well, maybe there was no time for a card. Why don’t you open it?”

“I don’t —If you think it’s all right.”

“I know it’s all right,” he said, making a noble effort not to be caught looking at his watch again.

Inside were Nonie’s letters, all done up neat and tight in their ribbon. The folded note inside said,

Dear Helen, I hand these over to you, on your eleventh birthday. May they sustain and guide you as they have me. There are some personal parts, but I didn’t want to black things out like in those censored letters from soldiers overseas. It would seem an insult to her. I will miss these precious letters but you have taught me so many things I’m grateful for, which I will try to incorporate into my life and my teaching.

Love from your admiring cousin, Flora Waring.

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t look at him. It seemed I also was encased in a mask that one wrong word or move could crack. “Did you know about this?”

“I did. We talked it over. She said you had asked to read them, but she was worried some parts were too old for you. Then she thought about it some more and decided you would grow into them. She said she wanted to give you something you’d treasure and the letters were the best thing she had.”

I think of Mrs. Jones, who was seventy that summer, driving after dark by herself to stand among the crowd gathered at the lake and say aloud, “Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten,” every time a pretty firework went up in the sky. Beryl Jones didn’t even know Stella Reeve, the little girl who had caught polio at the lake and died a few days later. She had only read about her in the newspaper, but she did it because her dear dead Rosemary, who in life had loved to make little memorial ceremonies, had suggested it.

I spent all those days and nights with Flora the summer I was ten and she was twenty-two: three weeks of June, all of July, and the first six days of August. I thought I knew all there was to know about her, but she has since become one of my profoundest teachers, though she never got to stand in front of a real class and teach.

These pages are for her. They are my attempt to stand among the crowd and say aloud for all to hear, “Flora Waring, you are not forgotten.”

“I came across this sentence I wanted to run by you,” my father said. This was back in the seventies. We were talking on the phone. There had been years when we didn’t talk, but now we had started again. “Here it is. I wrote it down for the next time you took it into your head to honor me with a call: ‘Suppose love were to evolve as rapidly in our brains as technical skill has done.’ What do you make of that?”

“Where is it from?”

“ A Burnt-Out Case . Dr. Colin, the leprosy doctor, is talking to Querry, the burnt-out architect. The doctor is still opting for evolutionary progress in spite of all the terrible things men have done to one another in the first half of our century.”

“You were reading that again ?” I was playing for time while I tried to work out what I thought about the sentence.

“Greene satisfies my perennial cynicism. But that little nugget of hope stuck out like a thorn this time around. What do you make of it? Is such a supposition likely?”

“Not in my lifetime,” I said, sensing his relief and approval through the receiver. “Certainly not in yours,” I generously added.

“Nope. I consider myself lucky to have gotten off with just an eye for eighty thousand and one lives. Well, just thought I’d run it past you.”

We both knew who was meant by the one life added to the final Hiroshima death count.

(“I had planned to leave Oak Ridge the next morning, the morning of your birthday, but then we got the news of the bomb. I went back to my room to leave Harker a note, since he might not have heard due to his deafness, but he had cleared out and left me a note. It said, ‘Fucking hell, Harry, this went too far, there will be retribution.’ When I got back to the site, half my crew had left and those who had remained were exhibiting the usual unsavory aspects of human nature. One announced that God had informed him about the bomb a week ago, but he had been under divine orders not to tell. Several of them petitioned for immediate jeopardy bonuses in case the whole place blew sky-high. One enterprising rogue was collecting bets on how many Japs had been killed and when the war would be over. And then there was the usual quota of worthy fellows cutting their eyes at you for approval: well, here I am, sir, ready to get on with the job, some of us have to be responsible around here. I realized I was more than a little unhinged and decided to leave at once, drive over the mountain before nightfall, and get out of this madness. I hadn’t touched a drop on the premises, but I was looking forward to driving up to the house and surprising you and Flora and then pouring myself a well-earned glass, or maybe more than one. I was thinking about that drink, in fact it was the last thing I can remember thinking about before I rounded the curve. It was dark as hell and then something flew out at me like a ghost. I turned the wheel as hard as I could to miss it, but I obviously didn’t succeed.”)

My father took a long time to recover from the accident. He “sustained,” as the jargon goes, a punctured lung, five cracked ribs, a broken femur (the polio leg), and the loss of his left eye. He referred to the eye almost cavalierly, especially in the old Hammurabi sense of an eye for an eye, and wore a black patch over it, but rarely mentioned the tragicomic dragging lurch, increasingly compounded by arthritis, that became his normal gait. He took even longer to emerge from a severe darkness of spirit in which he seemed to turn his unsparing disgust for human foibles completely against himself. (“Didn’t I tell you they’d find themselves a prince of an assistant principal, a young war hero and social scion with a good word for everybody and willing to coach the track team free of charge while one-eyed, gimpy, bad-assed old Harry takes his perpetual leave of absence?”)

His unlikely redeemer was the Old Mongrel himself, who took him out for long drives, settled his hospital bills, paid for us to have the Huffs’ cook (Lorena and Rachel had vanished into thin air the day after the bombing of Nagasaki, leaving a house that turned out to be rented and furniture that was leased, and without paying anyone except the manly riding teacher, who wisely got her fees in advance. They left behind a swath of delectable rumors, the prevalent one being that they were German spies. I think Annie Rickets’s speculations may have been closer to home: there was no Mr. Huff. Tall stories told by a woman of imagination and some ready cash who moves to town with her child are more easily swallowed in wartime.)

My father went into business with Earl Quarles, much to my amazement and disgust, and the two of them prospered in the postwar housing boom. When I was twelve I was sent to boarding school and became a little snob who vacationed with new friends and went home as seldom as possible—then on to college, followed by a breakdown and lengthy stay in an expensive institution, where I began writing, for therapy, but also out of disdain and boredom, a sort of elegiac tale about the Recoverers and the house my father and the Old Mongrel had torn down to build more of their mountain-view “estates.” Many reconstructions later, it was published as my first novel, House of Clouds .

When the Old Mongrel died in his upper nineties, my father demanded that I get on a plane and show myself at the funeral. Driving me back to the airport afterward, he dropped his bomb.