Gail Godwin - Flora

It would soon be the longest day, and with the sun pouring through the dining room’s west windows, we didn’t light the candles, though Flora recalled how Nonie had always done it with such gracious ceremony.

“Didn’t you have candles at home?” I asked.

“No,” said Flora, “but I remember when I was little how Daddy and Uncle Sam ate their breakfast by the light of a candle in a mustard jar.”

“You mean in the winter when the mornings were dark?”

“Oh, no, all year round. Even in summer, they left the shades down. They got in the habit of eating breakfast in the dark when they were younger and worked in the iron mines.”

“Why would anyone want to eat breakfast in the dark when they’re going to spend the whole day down in a dark mine?”

“That’s what I thought when I was little. But Daddy said miners prefer it. Later, Juliet told me Daddy and Uncle Sam also liked it because it reminded them of before they had electricity and their mother still made their breakfast.”

“That was my other grandmother?”

“No, she was your mother’s grandmother. That would make her your great-grandmother.”

“Did you ever know her?”

“No, but your mother remembered her. When she was a little girl she had to help take care of her and it wasn’t pleasant. The old lady was bedridden and couldn’t even go to the bathroom. She should have gone to a nursing home but back then families didn’t do that and also our family was too poor.”

“It’s just as well, then,” I said, cutting Flora off before she said any more about going to the bathroom at the table.

“What is, honey?”

“That I had just the one grandmother, who was wonderful.”

“Yes, she was. I don’t know where I would have been without your grandmother’s support. You were so lucky to have her, though it’s a shame you couldn’t have had Lisbeth, too. I was thinking on the train coming up, I had more time with your mother than you did. Lisbeth was a little mother to me.” Predictably the tear ducts opened. What would it be like to produce such easy evidence of your feelings? Yet I also felt superior to Flora in my habit of restraint.

“Could I ever read those letters?”

“Well, honey, they were private, you know.”

“You read them aloud to everybody after the funeral.”

“That probably wasn’t such a good idea. At least your father didn’t think so. But I meant it as a kind of tribute. And I didn’t read any of the really personal parts.”

Sunday began badly with the taxi driver and would get a lot worse.

“Y’all better get your dad-blamed driveway fixed before somebody busts an axle and prosecutes.”

“Oh!” yipped the adult-in-charge to whom this rebuke had been addressed.

“We are having it seen to, now that the war is over,” I piped up in my grandmother’s voice.

“Oh, seen to !” he imitated in falsetto, jolting us sideways to avoid a rut.

We were driven in hostile silence down Sunset Drive. It was a sultry, overcast day. I got an uneasy sensation as we passed the spot where my grandfather’s shortcut lay in ruins. There was a familiar smell in the taxi that reminded me of my father. At least he was spending the summer in a place where sobriety was enforced.

“We will need a taxi to take us home after church,” Flora humbly ventured as she clumsily selected coins with her gloves on to pay the driver.

“I’m off duty now, lady. Just call the number.”

“We can get a ride home with Mrs. Beale and Brian,” I said as we headed up the sidewalk to the church.

“You go first, Helen.” Flora nudged me ahead of her into the nave.

I led us to our family’s usual place in front on the pulpit side. Nonie liked to be up close so she could do without her glasses. Too late I realized that whatever Flora did wrong would be seen by everybody behind us.

“Are the Beales here yet?” she was anxiously whispering before I could sink to the cushion for silent prayer.

“They will be. You better kneel down.”

I didn’t remember how Flora had comported herself here during Nonie’s funeral, but it wouldn’t have been so noticeable that day, with so many people from other churches bobbing up and down at the wrong times. Today she dutifully mimed my actions. When it came time to follow in the prayer book, she kept leaning over to see what page I was on. During Father McFall’s sermon she turned red trying to suppress a cough until an imperious hand from behind tapped her shoulder and shoved a lozenge at her.

I made her go up for communion, because by that time I was so distressed it mattered very little to me whether she was eligible to take the sacrament or not. At the conclusion of his sermon, Father McFall had asked us from the pulpit to join him in saying the Prayer for a Sick Child. Brian Beale, he announced, had come down with polio over the weekend.

Father McFall himself drove us home. “When I saw you from the pulpit, Helen, I realized you hadn’t heard about Brian.”

Flora sat in front with the rector, who was diplomatically grilling her. He began by saying that he had been among the listeners when she was reading Mrs. Anstruther’s letters. Next came cordial inquiries about her Alabama life, her plans for the future, and her summer plans for the two of us. (“Though some activities may have to be forfeited, with this polio outbreak.”)

Brian had gone swimming at the municipal lake, which was now closed; one other child, a little girl, had been stricken and was in an iron lung.

“But his mother never lets him go to the municipal lake,” I protested from the backseat. “Mrs. Beale is scared silly of diseases.”

“Well, this time, rightly so. But it was a hot day and Brian was lonely and bored, so she gave in and took him and even went in the lake herself. She has scarcely left his bedside at the hospital.”

“Does this mean Brian is going to be crippled?”

“We’re taking it a step at a time, Helen.”

Though it gave his old Ford sedan a severe shaking, Father McFall allowed himself no comment on our driveway. I remembered to say, “Won’t you come in?” as Nonie always did when people brought me home, but he said he had hospital visits to make.

“Will you see Brian?”

“I’m headed straight there. Do you have a message for him?”

“Tell him I said please get better soon.”

Tell him I’m sorry. It was my fault .

“I’d like to visit you two during the week, if that’s all right. I’ll phone first,” Father McFall said in parting.

Inside the screen door, we found my Keds tied together with a ribbon. There was no note.

It was a hot day and Brian was lonely and bored .

If I had been there, he wouldn’t have been either of those things. We would have been in our outdoor sanctuary under the trees in his fenced-in backyard, which was visible enough from an upstairs window for his mother to spy on us. We would have drunk her iced apple juice and played Brian’s favorite game, in which he was either auditioning before a hard-to-please New York director (me) for a lead role or being coached by the director in his role.

If I had stayed at Brian’s last week rather than languishing in luxury at the Huffs’, he would have been in church this morning. As I passed his pew, his princely little profile would have swiveled just enough to beam me a possessive greeting: didn’t we have fun this past week? After church, the Beales would have driven Flora and me back to Old One Thousand and maybe Mrs. Beale would have let him stay overnight. Flora would have made hot biscuits to go with the ham, and for dessert there would have been more of the pound cake she had brought in the suitcase from Alabama. After supper, Brian would have sat down at our out-of-tune piano and picked out some show tunes, and Flora would have praised him and remarked happily on what a nice evening we were having, and then she would have excused herself and retired to the Willow Fanning room. And Brian and I, as we had done since we became spend-the-night friends back in first grade, would have separated to undress and then reconvened in either my room or his, which was my grandfather’s old consulting room. We would have snuggled hip to hip in our pajamas on top of the spread, covering our knees with a quilt, and taken turns reading aloud. I was the faster sight reader, but Brian liked to practice his delivery and his English accent. Sometimes we read from the books we had outgrown for the sake of doing the parts. He was always Eeyore and Piglet and I was always Pooh.