Oh, God, I hadn’t. Counterattack was my only defense. “Have
“It’s not your turn, Helen. I haven’t finished. You were always—” She stopped and then made a new start. “You’re smart, Helen, and I used to consider you my best friend, but your trouble is you think you’re better than other people. Mrs. Huff told Mammy that you got it from your grandmother. Who we all know went around with her nose stuck up so high a bird could have pooped in it.”
“Mrs. Huff said that?”
“The bird-poop part was me, but the rest was her.”
“That’s not fair! She’s dead!”
“Yes, and you’ve got a few more months of people feeling sorry for you. But after that, you’d better take a good, long look at yourself in the mirror.”
I could hardly breathe I was so hurt, but something told me to snatch what lemon-truths I could out of her before she rode out of my life forever. “What do you think is wrong with me?”
“What do I think? Well, it so happens I’ve thought a lot about it. Other people don’t exist when you’re not with them. We’re like toys or something. You play with them and examine them and then you put them on a shelf and go away. We don’t have lives, we’re just your playthings.”
Was this true? The idea struck home somehow. Yet there was something satisfying about others thinking of me like that. It put me out of the zone where I could get hurt.
Flora-like, my own eyes were leaking. Among other things, I felt I had not defended Nonie as she deserved.
“Listen,” said Annie, “Mammy is hovering, saying I have to get off the phone so they can disconnect it. Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Was I too harsh?”
“No, you were just being… lemony.”
“I really liked you, Helen. It’s just that—”
“I’m going to hang up now, Annie. Good luck with your new friends. And remember to keep your mouth closed when you chew.”
I hung up quietly and sat for some minutes at the wobbly little phone desk in the upstairs hall. It had been in the same spot ever since I could remember, though the phone models had changed. I was glad she was leaving town. She wouldn’t be around to blab her findings to anyone else.
But Mrs. Huff would. She was probably standing on some street corner right now, waiting to tell another mother about my bad behavior. If Nonie had been alive, I would have written the thank-you note and I would have written to Brian before Father McFall forced me into it. It was true I had been counting on people feeling sorry for me and overlooking my lapses because I had lost my grandmother.
I could hear Flora downstairs (she sounded as though she was in the living room) humming “Begin the Beguine” in breathless, hopping snatches, while she scrubbed something with a brush. What had she found to scrub that Mrs. Jones hadn’t already scrubbed?
All the unoccupied rooms were left open to keep them, Mrs. Jones said, from getting that shut-up smell. (“Empty rooms need to breathe so they can stay connected to the rest of the house.”)
The doors to the two front rooms, my father’s and Flora’s, were closed. I suppose Mrs. Jones felt that my father, as living head of the household, occupied the Hyman Highsmith room in spirit even though he was away at Oak Ridge. This was the room my father and mother had shared. It had its own porch entrance, to the south porch, just as Flora’s Willow Fanning room had its own porch entrance to the west porch.
I entered my father’s room, which smelled of furniture polish. It was the barest room in the house. After some recent falls from too much Jack Daniel’s, he had rolled up the handsome Persian area rugs and bestowed them on the two lesser Recoverers’ rooms. That left the bed that he and my mother had slept in and the bookcase he had made and an old Victorian flattop desk he had found at a sale and refinished. The bookcase held only books about carpentry or furniture and was more empty than full. Mrs. Jones had outdone herself on the bare wood in this room because there was more of it here than anything else. Trophies from my father’s public life were on display at the other end of the hall, in Doctor Cam’s old consulting room, which Nonie had made into a family shrine room. Harry’s college diploma was in a frame next to my grandfather’s medical credentials. His bound senior thesis in history (“The Decline of Southern Honor After Appomattox”) leaned against Doctor Cam’s bound volume of handwritten poems (“midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this December morn / a boy is born”). The family photos were also in the shrine room (a stiff-looking Nonie in long skirts holding the newborn Harry, a studio portrait of a younger Doctor Cam before he met Nonie, Lisbeth and Harry and Nonie on my parents’ wedding day, and lots of me in all my stages to date. There was this one photo of my mother in a fur coat squatting beside me in my snowsuit. She looked strained by her squatting position but determined to pose like a mother enjoying the snow with her child.
“Isn’t it about time,” Nonie had cheerfully suggested to my father not so long ago, “we started calling the Hyman Highsmith room the Harry Astruther room? You’ve been living in it, except for college, since you were sixteen.”
“Oh, let’s keep it the Hyman Highsmith room,” my father had said. “Harry Anstruther doesn’t live in it.”
“Then who does, pray tell?”
“You tell me.”
Downstairs, Flora, still erupting little snatches of “Begin the Beguine,” was scrubbing something more distant than whatever she had been scrubbing before. I had no hesitation in crossing the hall and entering her room. I had done this in imagination already and had progressively worked out the kinks in my plan. I opened the top drawer. The packet of letters now faced downward and the ribbon that bound them was looser than it had been when I first saw her place them in the drawer. She must have been reading them. I was able to slide the face-down top letter from its envelope without disturbing the ribbon. When you are doing something behind someone’s back, you feel slightly cheated if they make it too easy. You may even feel they deserve it. Heart thudding, I quietly let myself out of her room, crossed the hall, reentered my father’s room, closing the door, and went outside to the south porch. Shut off twice, I felt twice protected.
I read the letter standing at the rail, which was prickly with peeled paint. It took me several tries before I calmed down enough to register what was in it. It was clearly Nonie’s first reply in the famous correspondence, which meant Flora probably kept the letters in chronological order, with the first one at the bottom. I was disappointed. Nonie didn’t come through as strong and wise as I had expected, and what she conveyed was more confusing than enlightening. I was mentioned only once, at the very end—almost like a dutiful afterthought.
I couldn’t wait to retrace my furtive route and get the thing back in its envelope, though I resolved to read more of the letters whenever opportunities arose. Meanwhile I would be thinking up ways to make those opportunities.
November 4, 1938
Dear Flora,
Your news has distressed us. My heart goes out to you. It is a terrible thing to lose a parent and all the more devastating when you only have the one to lose. In the short time we were with your father, it was clear how much he loved you and looked out for you.
Of
Yes, it is doubly hard for you, as you said, to have lost the two people you loved most within a single year. Though it has been almost a year since Lisbeth’s death, I am still fairly reeling from the loss of her. You had her when you were a child and I had her when I was old enough to be her mother. But she was more than “like a daughter” to me. She was the better, cooler young woman I wished I had been, and I loved watching her grow in self-confidence. She was one of those people who flourish best under a certain amount of protection, and I like to think we provided her with that protection. Lisbeth and I were not demonstrative women, but we treasured each other’s company and admired each other. I had things to teach her and she had things to teach us. I miss her more than I can say.
