Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Well, maybe now she’ll get what she should’ve got the first time round,” the friend from the post office said. “Maybe now they’ll be able to get married. Is she too old to start a family? How old is she, anyway?”

My mother thought that this was a crude way of talking about Flora and replied that she didn’t know. But she had to admit to herself that she had been thinking the very same thing.

When she was married and settled in her own home, three hundred miles away, my mother got a letter from Flora. Ellie was dead. She had died firm in her faith, Flora said, and grateful for her release. Nurse Atkinson was staying on for a little while, until it was time for her to go off to her next case. This was late in the summer.

News of what happened next did not come from Flora. When she wrote at Christmas she seemed to take for granted that information would have gone ahead of her.

“You have in all probability heard,” wrote Flora, “that Robert and Nurse Atkinson have been married. They are living on here, in Robert’s part of the house. They are fixing it up to suit themselves. It is very impolite of me to call her Nurse Atkinson, as I see I have done. I ought to have called her Audrey.”

Of course, the post-office friend had written, and so had others. It was a great shock and scandal and a matter that excited the district — the wedding as secret and surprising as Robert’s first one had been (though surely not for the same reason), Nurse Atkinson permanently installed in the community, Flora losing out for the second time. Nobody had been aware of any courtship, and they asked how the woman could have enticed him. Did she promise children, lying about her age?

The surprises were not to stop with the wedding. The bride got down to business immediately with the “fixing up” that Flora mentioned. In came the electricity and then the telephone. Now Nurse Atkinson — she would always be called Nurse Atkinson — was heard on the party line lambasting painters and paperhangers and delivery services. She was having everything done over. She was buying an electric stove and putting in a bathroom, and who knew where the money was coming from? Was it all hers, got in her deathbed dealings, in shady bequests? Was it Robert’s? Was he claiming his share — Ellie’s share, left to him and Nurse Atkinson to enjoy themselves with, the shameless pair?

All these improvements took place on one side of the house only. Flora’s side remained just as it was. No electric lights there, no fresh wallpaper or new venetian blinds. When the house was painted on the outside — cream with dark green trim — Flora’s side was left bare. This strange open statement was greeted at first with pity and disapproval — poor Flora! — then with less sympathy, as a sign of Flora’s stubbornness and eccentricity — she could buy her own paint and make it look decent — and finally as a joke. People drove out of their way to see it.

There was always a dance given in the schoolhouse for a newly married couple. A cash collection — called “a purse of money”—was presented to them. Nurse Atkinson sent out word that she would not mind seeing this custom followed, even though it happened that the family she had married into was opposed to dancing. Some people thought it would be a disgrace to gratify her, a slap in the face to Flora. Others were too curious to hold back. They wanted to see how the newlyweds would behave. Would Robert dance? What sort of outfit would the bride show up in? They delayed awhile, but finally the dance was held, and my mother got her report.

The bride wore the dress she had worn at her wedding, or so she said. But who would wear such a dress for a wedding at the manse? More than likely it was bought specially for her appearance at the dance. Pure white satin with a sweetheart neckline, idiotically youthful. The groom was got up in a new dark blue suit, and she had stuck a flower in his buttonhole. They were a sight. Her hair was freshly done to blind the eye with brassy reflections, and her face looked as if it would come off on a man’s jacket, should she lay it against his shoulder in the dancing. Of course she did dance. She danced with every man except the groom, who sat scrunched into one of the school desks along the wall. She danced with every man present — they all claimed they had to do it, it was the custom — and then she dragged Robert out to receive the money and to thank everybody for their best wishes. To the ladies in the cloakroom she even hinted that she was feeling unwell, for the usual newlywed reason. Nobody believed her, and indeed nothing ever came of this hope, if she really had it. Some of the women thought that she was lying to them out of malice, insulting them, making them out to be so credulous. But nobody challenged her, nobody was rude to her — maybe because it was plain that she could summon a rudeness of her own to knock anybody flat.

Flora was not present at the dance.

“My sister-in-law is not a dancer,” said Nurse Atkinson. “She is stuck in the olden times.” She invited them to laugh at Flora, whom she always called her sister-in-law, though she had no right to do so.

My mother wrote a letter to Flora, after hearing about all these things. Being removed from the scene, and perhaps in a flurry of importance owing to her own newly married state, she may have lost sight of the kind of person she was writing to. She offered sympathy and showed outrage, and said blunt disparaging things about the woman who had — as my mother saw it — dealt Flora such a blow. Back came a letter from Flora saying that she did not know where my mother had been getting her information, but that it seemed she had misunderstood, or listened to malicious people, or jumped to unjustified conclusions. What happened in Flora’s family was nobody else’s business, and certainly nobody needed to feel sorry for her or angry on her behalf. Flora said that she was happy and satisfied in her life, as she always had been, and she did not interfere with what others did or wanted, because such things did not concern her. She wished my mother all happiness in her marriage and hoped that she would soon be too busy with her own responsibilities to worry about the lives of people that she used to know.

This well-written letter cut my mother, as she said, to the quick. She and Flora stopped corresponding. My mother did become busy with her own life and finally a prisoner in it.

But she thought about Flora. In later years, when she sometimes talked about the things she might have been, or done, she would say, “If I could have been a writer — I do think I could have been; I could have been a writer — then I would have written the story of Flora’s life. And do you know what I would have called it? ‘The Maiden Lady.’”

The Maiden Lady . She said these words in a solemn and sentimental tone of voice which I had no use for. I knew, or thought I knew, exactly the value she found in them. The stateliness and mystery. The hint of derision turning to reverence. I was fifteen or sixteen years old by that time, and I believed that I could see into my mother’s mind. I could see what she would do with Flora, what she had already done. She would make her into a noble figure, one who accepts defection, treachery, who forgives and stands aside, not once but twice. Never a moment of complaint. Flora goes about her cheerful labors, she cleans the house and shovels out the cow byre, she removes some bloody mess from her sister’s bed, and when at last the future seems to open up for her — Ellie will die and Robert will beg forgiveness and Flora will silence him with the proud gift of herself — it is time for Audrey Atkinson to drive into the yard and shut Flora out again, more inexplicably and thoroughly the second time than the first. She must endure the painting of the house, the electric lights, all the prosperous activity next door. “Make Believe Ballroom,” “Amos ’n’ Andy.” No more Scottish or ancient sermons. She must see them drive off to the dance — her old lover and that cold-hearted, stupid, by no means beautiful woman in the white satin wedding dress. She is mocked. (And of course she has made over the farm to Ellie and Robert, of course he has inherited it, and now everything belongs to Audrey Atkinson.) The wicked flourish. But it is all right. It is all right — the elect are veiled in patience and humility and lighted by a certainty that events cannot disturb.