“The poor child thinks I am her diary,” Nonie would remark, reading Flora’s latest letter. Sometimes she would shake her head and murmur, “Gracious!” The letters disappeared before anyone else could read them. “Young people shouldn’t write down personal things they might regret later,” Nonie said.
FLORA RODE THE train to Nonie’s funeral in the spring of 1945. She was in her last year of teachers’ college in Birmingham and hoped to begin teaching in the fall.
“Flora’s turned into a looker,” said my father, making it sound like something short of a compliment. “Though not in your mother’s style.”
When friends came back to our house after the funeral, Flora greeted them and passed platters and refilled glasses like she was part of the family, which I suppose she felt she was. After the crowd had thinned, we noticed that a cluster of people had gathered around Nonie’s wing chair and then we saw that Flora was sitting in it—the first person to do so since Nonie’s death. She appeared to be telling a story. Everyone was rapt, even Father McFall, the circumspect rector of Our Lady’s, though he was careful to register a degree of separateness by the quizzical twist of his brow. Flora, softly weeping, was reading from something in her lap. When my father and I edged closer we saw that she was reading aloud from Nonie’s letters.
I can still see Flora, the way her large, moonlike face floated out at you from the frame of the wing chair. She wore her dark hair swept back from a middle parting, then falling in soft waves over the ears and pinned up loosely at the nape of the neck, a style you often see in movies and television dramas being faithful to the late 1930s and early ’40s. Her forehead was spacious, though not high, and her wide-apart brown eyes, when they were not silky with tears, conveyed an ardent eagerness to be impressed.
What she was reading from my grandmother’s letters seemed to be snippets of the kind of soldierly counsel Nonie loved to dispense to everyone. About taking control of your life and making something of yourself. But after listening for a minute, my father sent me over to tell Flora he wanted to speak with her in the kitchen and that was the end of the performance.
I have often wondered if that was when he broached the idea of her staying with me while he went back for his second summer to the construction job in Oak Ridge, where they were making something highly secret for the war effort. This would have been in character. My father loathed displays of emotion and he may have decided to offer me up, since he needed someone anyway, rather than to reprimand Flora about the letters and evoke her gift of tears.
II.
My grandmother died while choosing her Easter hat. She was downtown in Blum’s department store and had just pinned on a Stetson trilby with a dashing black plume that had tiny seed pearls sewn into it like random raindrops. “You’re coming home with me, handsome,” she addressed the hat in the mirror. Her last words were “Mrs. Grimes, could I trouble you for a glass of water?” When the saleslady returned with the water, Nonie was pitched forward, her hand deep in her purse. She had been reaching for her vial of nitroglycerin tablets. Mr. Blum insisted we were under no obligation when my father said he wanted to buy the hat. “But my daughter wants it, you see,” my father explained. “It was Helen’s idea.” “In that case, allow me to make a gift of it to her,” said Mr. Blum. “It’s a becoming hat that will never go out of style. She can wear it herself someday.”
This exchange was reported to me by my father. Just as Nonie’s last moments were reported by others to him. Yet I saw both scenes as though I had been there. I was also achingly present at an alternative scene in which I had been standing right behind her, watching her try on the hats in the three-way mirror.
“This one suits me, doesn’t it, Helen?”
“Oh, it really does.”
Whereupon she would have addressed the handsome hat. And then: a sudden widening of the eyes, a hand slapped to her chest: “Quick, darling, go in my purse and fetch me…” She trusted my nimble fingers to do the rest: root in the bag, twist open the familiar vial, hand over the doll’s-size pill.
(“And if I should have already fainted, Helen, you know what to do.” “Open your mouth and slip it under your tongue.” “That’s right, darling, like a baby bird feeding the mama bird.”)
We had rehearsed it.
Later, when I had attained an age she never reached, there was a television commercial that never failed to choke me up. A man and his son are walking in the country when suddenly the father clutches his chest, the landscape turns a sickly sepia, and the father falls. But the son whips out a Bayer aspirin, the father rises to his feet, embraces the son, and Technicolor is restored to their lives.
“Don’t worry, I have every intention of sticking around till I’ve finished raising you,” Nonie always assured me after one of her episodes, and I could hear her saying it again that day—the day we never had. If only she had waited till my school was out so I could have been there to whip out the little vial in Blum’s and save the day.
The day after Nonie’s funeral, my father and I drove Flora to the train station. She had to return to her teachers’ college and finish the semester. “For the rest of my life, whenever I see or hear a locomotive, I’ll miss Daddy,” she said, starting to weep as the Birmingham train pulled in. My father rolled his eyes and handed over his handkerchief. “Keep it,” he said. “We’ll see you in June.”
“Why did you say that about June?” I demanded as soon as we were alone.
“I’ve asked Flora to stay with you this summer while I’m at Oak Ridge. I can’t pay her a whole lot, but she’ll be saving on her expenses, and she wants to do it.”
I was stung. All the more so because this had been decided between them behind my back. “You mean, like a babysitter?”
“Ten is not old enough to stay alone, Helen.”
“I’ll be eleven in August.”
“Even if you were going to be sixteen in August, that still wouldn’t be old enough. I thought you and Flora got on.”
We were driving across the bridge that arched above the railroad yards. The “put-upon” voice that my father always employed with Nonie when she was backing him into a corner was now being directed at me. Did Flora and I get on? It was more like Flora praised and deferred to me and I tolerated her because she was my mother’s first cousin and showed up at family funerals. Until now, I had assumed both my father and I considered her somewhat awkward and childlike. Yet here he was putting her in charge for the summer.
“This is such a strange time for me,” he said in the same keep-clear-of-me voice he’d used when he picked me up at school on the day of Nonie’s death. “Mother is gone,” he had said. “Just like that, in Blum’s. Don’t ask me what we’re going to do next because I don’t know.”
EASTER THAT YEAR fell on April first, only a few days after Nonie’s funeral. I felt self- conscious in church. I had gone everywhere with Nonie, and I could hear people silently wondering how I was ever going to manage without her. Those who hadn’t known us well enough to come to the house for the funeral reception gathered round after church to offer condolences. My father and I were worn out by the time we got home. He made us grilled pimento cheese sandwiches in the skillet, letting them get too dark, and washed his down with Jack Daniel’s in an iced tea glass. Then we sat side by side at the dining room table and answered more sympathy letters. He wrote the messages and I addressed the envelopes and licked the flaps and put on the stamps. When I pointed out that the recipients would notice our different handwritings, he said, “Fine. They’ll be all the more charmed and touched.” His voice had edged over into sarcasm by then.
Then came a letter that made him swear.
“Who’s it from?”
“That old mongrel we saw crying at the funeral home.”
“What does
