Flora

We sat on either side of him on the sofa and watched the agile pencil, which seemed like an extension of his hand, bring to life Nonie’s wing chair and the little painting above it, and then the eight-foot highboy looming in its shadowy corner, and then on to Nonie’s desk, which faced the window that used to have a view of the mountains. Finn evoked the highboy’s gloomy corner with hard, slanted lines that got closer together the darker he wanted the shadows. The branches that now obstructed the view he rendered with intricate wispy strokes. His shadows brought out the room’s spooky potential, and the erratic clutter of his branches made you feel the sadness of everything going to pieces around you. He commented as he drew: “What Grace wouldn’t give for that highboy. What a lovely little desk.”

“My father refinished that desk for my grandmother,” I said. “He likes working with wood a lot better than having to kowtow to faculty egos.”

Which really made Finn laugh.

“She wrote her letters at that desk,” Flora had to put in. “She wrote her letters to me at that desk.” She was about to call on her gift of tears when I shot her a murderous look and she pulled herself up short and offered instead, “Six years’ worth of letters. Those letters from Mrs. Anstruther have become my guide for living, why, they have saved me from—”

Who knows what she would have blurted next if I hadn’t asked Finn where he had learned to draw like that.

“Oh, it was just this thing I started doing after I came to America. Bill liked me to draw scenes from Ireland. He had left as a baby and couldn’t remember anything. And I drew the men in my company, each with some personal military object, like his helmet hanging on the wall, so they could send home war portraits of themselves.”

“You can do people, too?” marveled Flora.

“Surely I can. Will I draw the two of you?” (That funny “will” of his again.) “How about the two of you sitting side by side on the sofa?”

“No, just draw Helen. She’ll like it better if I’m not in it,” Flora told him without the slightest hint of rancor. I can still hear her saying those words.

“Maybe I should sit over there in my grandmother’s chair,” I said.

“You get to know a person when you draw them,” Finn commented after he had laid in a few strokes, interspersed by quick glances. He scrutinized me the way he had the furniture. Sitting close beside him, Flora squeaked encouraging little mmms, which seemed to be more about the drawing than about me. Once she said, “Oh!”

“What?” I said.

“He got that look of yours when you’re—”

“When I’m what?”

“Keep still,” Finn commanded.

“Can’t I even speak?”

“You can speak if you don’t change your expression or move your mouth.”

“How do you get to know a person when you draw them?”

“You catch some of their passing thoughts,” he said. “Now, do ye think you can keep your face still and just lift one hand out of your lap and lay it on the arm of the chair?”

“Which hand?”

“The right… no, I mean your left. So it’ll be the one on my right. Now unclench your fingers and let them hang loose over the edge of the chair, and would it be too much to ask you to lose the frown? Good girl.”

THE YOUNG EX-SOLDIER’S pointy face, sharp nose elongated by the shadows of the lamp-lit room, made him look like a skinny magician growing out of a myth as he drew the frowning girl-child self- importantly arranged in her late grandmother’s wing chair. I made much of the shadows and the history of that shabby room in “Impediments,” the title story in a collection of stories about failed loves. In the story, the young man is awed to be in the house and he is trying to impress the young woman sitting beside him by drawing her grumpy little cousin. He is deeply attracted to the young woman, she is different from the usual pretty girl, she has a natural, unspoiled warmth and an endearing determination to make you feel appreciated. But the young woman goes away at the end of the summer and the soldier is left with his unrequited love. Yet this evening of lamplight and shadows in the arrogant, crumbling old house on top of a mountain will serve him all his life as a source of his art. It, more than any other source, is responsible for the elegiac, “lost,” overlay that haunts his canvases and wins him fame and fortune. Years later, he sees a frowning woman sitting in a wing chair across a crowded room. She is balancing a glass of champagne rather primly on her lap and staring into a space that seems far from this room. The vision instantly fires up in him the old, trusted elegiac spark and he goes over to her and says, “I’d like to sketch you, just as you are, in that chair.” And she comes back from whatever faraway place she has been in and looks at him closely and says, “But you already have.” He thinks she is speaking symbolically or trying to charm him by being mysterious. But she lets him sketch her, just as she is, balancing her glass of champagne primly on her knees. Soon a crowd has gathered around the wing chair: who can resist the spectacle of a famous artist on one knee in front of a chair, sketching an unknown woman? He says, “You are a very good model. You keep still, but you don’t hide the flow of your thoughts.” She responds with a distant half smile. He signs the drawing and offers it to her, but she says, “No, keep it to remember me by,” and stands up, puts down her undrunk champagne, and walks out of the party. The reader knows that she has loved him since she was ten and has measured all men since then by his memory. But she has also, over the span of years, grown into her father’s cynicism and is hardened enough not to try for a belated romantic ending.

XV.

I was helping to strip Nonie’s bed. It was the day of the week I felt sanest. Mrs. Jones had known the Recoverers and Doctor Cam and my father when he was sixteen and the elusive Lisbeth. She knew what I had lost in Nonie. Her Tuesday appearances attached me to my old world.

Each week she took away bundles and the following week she brought back separate flat packages labeled by room. Each piece was marked in India ink so the laundry would know which room it belonged to when they made up the packages. Nonie’s linens were marked MASTER; Flora’s were marked FANNING. My father’s were marked HIGHSMITH.

“I reckon I’ll be going to those fireworks tomorrow night they’re having down at the lake,” said Mrs. Jones.

“But you hate fireworks.”

“Not hate. It’s just them going off unexpectedly makes me jump. But this time I’m going for that little girl who died from polio. It was Rosemary’s idea.”

I waited the way Mrs. Jones had shown me how to wait when we were beginning this kind of conversation.

“Rosemary always was one for remembrances. She loved little ceremonies. For people who had passed or for a neighbor’s pet. I woke straight out of sleep and she was saying clear as anything, ‘Mamma, go down to the lake on the Fourth and every time a pretty firework goes up in the night sky say “Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten.”’ That was the little girl’s name. It was in the paper. She was from Georgia. Her aunt was driving her to camp. It was so hot, the aunt said, and they saw this lake and decided to stop there for a swim.”

“You’ll go all by yourself at night?”

“I usually am all by myself.”

“I wish I could go with you.”

“That would be nice. But you have to mind your father. He has his reasons.”

“I can’t wait till school starts, even if all my friends are gone.”

“You’ll make new friends. How are you liking that library book I brought?”

“Oh, it was fine.”

“You already finished it?”