Flora

“Now how did you know that?”

“It’s their specialty. My grandfather helped them start that hospital. He was a doctor. This house used to be his convalescent home where people could finish recovering from lung problems. Or sometimes mental problems.”

His high-pitched laugh resembled a cry of pain. “The perfect place for me.”

“How do you mean?”

“I had a collapsed lung and then later came the mental problems.”

Then here came Flora flying out of the house, apologizing for having been upstairs, as if her presence were required before any two people could start an interesting conversation, apologizing for “our” driveway, and oh, what a cute machine, but such a hot day to be outside riding around bareheaded.

“This is Finn, who’ll be delivering our groceries,” I cut her off. I introduced her simply as Flora, leaving off the cousin part.

Flora plunged into a handshake, all polio warnings forgotten, and said she hoped we hadn’t weighed him down by ordering too much, we would try not to order too often.

“Oh, I have people who order every single day,” said Finn.

“My goodness, every day?” exclaimed Flora, sounding foolishly impressed.

“Many of our customers don’t have refrigeration.”

“We didn’t have refrigeration back in Alabama when I was growing up,” Flora eagerly volunteered. “Just this one little icebox in the cellar with a block of ice. The iceman brought us a new block twice a week.”

Shut up, I was thinking, but Finn only smiled at her. “I’ve got this one lady,” he said, “who doesn’t hesitate to phone the store whenever she remembers something she forgot.”

“She must be a rich lady,” I said sarcastically.

“Ah, no,” he said. “She’s a lonely old lady who’s losing her memory. But I always fit her in. It’s no trouble at all.” (He sweetly pronounced it “a-tall.”) He seemed like a kind, good-humored person, if a little odd-looking. It was certainly kind of him to pretend not to notice what a fool Flora was.

Somehow we got the grocery bags into the kitchen without her embarrassing me again, though she did keep calling me her little cousin and had started up again about the okra. I made sure Finn got a good look at our Frigidaire, which was more up-to-date than anything else in the house. This was not Flora’s Alabama. It would have been interesting to hear about his collapsed lung and even more about the mental problems, but I needed to get him away before he started dreading his future deliveries to these two isolated females at the top of their holy terror drive.

“WHY DO WE always have to eat at six?” I asked Flora, when she started rolling out her biscuit dough.

“Because that’s when people eat.”

“We never used to eat at six. We ate at all different times. My father and Nonie had to have their cocktails first.”

“Well, you and I don’t have any cocktails.” She looked very proud of her clever reply.

“But it’s still afternoon outside.”

“Go outside then. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

“Did that Negro maid make biscuits every day back in Alabama?”

“I’ve told you, Juliet isn’t a maid. She’s part owner of our house.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

“Well, it’s true. Many a time she’s had to make the whole mortgage payment by herself. When Uncle Sam dies, it’ll be all hers.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Aren’t you your uncle’s next of kin?”

“I’ll have a job teaching by then. I can make a down payment on my own place if I want one. I might even be married.”

“Married?”

“Don’t look so surprised. So far, two people have asked me.”

“What was wrong with them?”

“Why should anything be wrong with them? Because they wanted me?”

“No, no! I just meant—”

“I know, honey. I was teasing. One was a lawyer. The other owned a farm. He’s the one who offered to drive me to that interview in his truck. Maybe I’d have done better to let him. The subject of my not driving might never have come up.”

“What about the lawyer?”

“He was too old, for one thing—he had two grown children. I worked for him one summer and he was very nice to me. But I wasn’t really attracted to him.” She giggled. “He had little hairs growing out of his ears.”

I recalled the hairs growing out of my father’s ears. Rachel Huff’s mother had told her that with Nonie gone my father would probably want to marry again.

During supper, I thought about Finn, but kept him to myself. Then Flora said brightly, “I hope we didn’t go against your father’s wishes by letting that nice delivery boy carry our groceries in. Do you think we did?”

“Did what?”

“Go against your father’s wishes. But your cleaning woman is coming tomorrow, isn’t she? Mrs. Jones. She must have been going in and out of all sorts of public places, too. We can’t be expected to live completely in a vacuum, can we?”

“We’re doing a pretty good job, if you ask me.”

IX.

Mrs. Jones arrived at nine on Tuesdays, bringing back the clean sheets and towels she had dropped off at the linen service the week before. She had been cleaning this house for thirty years. She remembered the doctor in his final years, and my father as a teenager before his polio. She remembered the Recoverers and she remembered my mother and she remembered me before I could remember myself. Her own little Rosemary had been alive when Mrs. Jones started coming to our house. She still brought her lunch in Rosemary’s old school lunch box, a thermos of hot tea (which she said kept her warm in winter and cool in summer), and her own table-model radio, which she carried under her arm and plugged into the wall sockets of the different upstairs rooms as she went about her work. Starting with the kitchen, she did the downstairs rooms in the morning. She didn’t like to be talked to when she was scrubbing the kitchen floor because she said being on her knees and the rhythm of the arm motions made it the ideal time for going over her life. She didn’t play the radio in the morning, radio was for the afternoon upstairs. Guiding Light and All My Children were for the Willow Fanning room; then a silent break for the Willow Fanning half bath and the front upstairs bathroom (she considered tiled floors with their proximity to water unsafe for plugged-in devices); then on to Ma Perkins and Pepper Young’s Family in the Hyman Highsmith room; then Stella Dallas and Lorenzo Jones for the two nameless Recoverers’ rooms, whose guests had been more forgettable, except for the one who had let us down. When a Girl Marries was for my grandfather’s consultation room, and she finished her day with Portia Faces Life in his half bath, which had a wood floor.

“I admire that woman,” Nonie said. “Despite all her adversities, Beryl Jones manages to stay in control of her days. How many people do you know who can do that?”

On this Tuesday, Flora took it on herself to welcome Mrs. Jones to the house. “I’m Helen’s first cousin once removed. Her mother and I grew up together in Alabama. Sometimes she was like my big sister and sometimes she was like a little mother. Did I meet you at the funeral reception, Mrs. Jones?”

“No, ma’am, I wasn’t able to make the reception.”