Flora

new complex under construction, and made no secret about his impatience to leave. He’d much rather be outdoors supervising an important project for the war effort, he said, than kowtowing to small-town faculty egos. He had been the principal of Mountain City High since I was born, but loved to grumble that carpentry and construction work was his true calling, which had been thwarted by the social expectations of others.

Also—and he couldn’t stop reminding me of this—Oak Ridge would be a healthful change of pace for him because no alcohol was allowed on the premises.

I was as willing for him to go as he was chafing to be gone. Nonie’s removal had altered things between us. The “put-upon” note in his voice, which Nonie had her ways of quelling, was now directed at me, who only seemed to exacerbate it.

I had not known how wobbly things were at Old One Thousand. I barely knew what a mortgage was. Hitler had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, and the European part of the war had ended in early May, which was supposed to have made everybody happy, except it didn’t. All sorts of qualified young men with talents or important connections would be coming home soon to wrest away jobs from the “old guys” like my father, who was forty- five.

We got on each other’s nerves. One minute he was treating me like a child and then the very next was complaining that something I had said or done was “downright childish.” My worst offense had been at a coffee hour after church. President Roosevelt had died only a few weeks after Nonie, and some people my father didn’t like but who were influential in the community were saying wasn’t it sad that FDR hadn’t lived to see V-E Day. My father stood looking over our heads, encased in his laconic reserve, and I felt that somebody in our family needed to point out that Nonie hadn’t admired FDR all that much.

One evening there was a curse and a thud, and I found my father passed out on the kitchen floor. While I was kneeling over him, wiping the blood from his forehead, I prepared myself to receive fatherly praise for being just where I was needed with the wet cloth. But he cracked open an eye and slurred, “Get the fuck away.”

His June first departure meant I would have to stay with a friend during the week before Flora arrived. I had three friends in fifth grade. My favorite was Annie Rickets, with her wild imagination and her gleeful malice. She speculated outlandishly about what was going on behind the scenes in the lives of people we knew. Both her parents worked for the phone company and, she darkly hinted, had access to equipment that could breach any secret, local or national. Also she was witty about sex. Nonie had provided me with an overview of how things worked, but Annie contributed specific anecdotes garnered from her frank-talking mother and her own salacious speculations. Her gleeful malice occasionally went too far, like when she said my grandmother looked like an upright mastiff driving a car. I found a picture of a mastiff in a dog book and didn’t speak to her for a week. From then on Nonie was off-limits. But Annie shared a walled-in sleeping porch with her two younger sisters and couldn’t have overnight guests.

Then there was Brian Beale, a late-born child who looked like a young prince in an old-fashioned storybook. His father was dead, and his mother, who cochaired the altar guild with Nonie, was raising Brian to be a classic actor. He was taking elocution lessons from an English lady in town to get rid of his mountain twang. Brian and I were allowed to go to afternoon movies by ourselves, and he liked to drawl in his new-fledged British accent, “When we are older, Helen, I shall probably ask for your hand.” Brian had stayed at our house two years before, when his mother had an operation, and when I told him about Flora not being able to come till the second week in June, he said, “You’ll stay with us, of course.” I thanked him and imagined myself already there, though Mrs. Beale was an awful worrier and wouldn’t let us do much. But then Lorena Huff phoned and said she and Rachel were counting on my staying with them. My father left it up to me, and guiltily I chose the Huffs. I lied to Brian that my father thought it was more proper for me to stay with a girl. Rachel Huff, who had moved to town with her mother at the beginning of the war, was less fun than either Annie or Brian. Also she asked rude personal questions and was usually in a grumpy mood from being forced by her mother to excel in so many things. But they had a huge house and a good cook and a pool, and Rachel had twin beds with canopies and her own bathroom and a maid who picked up your discarded clothes. Mr. Huff was up in Washington doing something so important for the war that he could never come home. But he was always sending contraband items like steaks and Hershey’s bars, and Mrs. Huff admired me. She said I was a good influence on Rachel. She was also partial to my father. Nonie had enjoyed teasing him about this.

When he dropped me off for my week’s stay with them, there was Mrs. Huff’s usual cagey flirtation to get through while they had their drinks.

“Tell me, Harry, what are they really making over there in Oak Ridge? One of Huffie’s sources says it’s a new kind of fuel, so the planes can go on longer raids to bomb the Japs.”

“That’s as good an educated guess as any, Lorena, but I can only tell you what I’ll be doing. Overseeing the construction of a new complex and making sure the men on my crew show up for work. I wish I could do that sort of thing all year round. I’m not cut out to be a school administrator.”

“You’d be good at any kind of work you chose, Harry, but I’m a little hurt with you. Helen could have perfectly well stayed with Rachel and me the whole summer. We have everything here. You had no need to import some fancy governess from out of town.”

“Flora is my wife’s first cousin. She’s training to be a teacher, but she’s hardly a fancy governess. I thought it would be better for Helen to stay in her own home. She’s had enough upheaval as it is.”

“Wasn’t she that emotional girl reading your mother’s letters to everyone after the funeral? Well, you know best, but if for some reason it doesn’t work out with Flora, my offer stands.”

“That’s very generous of you, Lorena, but I see no reason why things shouldn’t work out.”

The week with the Huffs turned out to be a torment. Everyone had a schedule but me. Rachel and her mother were on the tennis court before breakfast. I lay in bed hearing their back-and-forth thwocks, interspersed with Lorena Huff’s criticisms and Rachel’s sullen groans. Then the cook started her breakfast sounds, and here came the gardener’s truck rattling up the drive, and after that began the various parcel deliveries, which seemed to go on all day. Ladies arrived to see Lorena Huff, and they sat on the screened porch and tinkled ice and planned charitable events. Twice a week a man came to the house to teach Rachel piano (she was on John Thompson’s book two), and every afternoon at three a mannish woman in jodhpurs drove Rachel away in a jeep for her riding lesson.

“I want you to treat our house like a resort,” Lorena Huff said. “Swim in the pool, have little talks with Rachel, and show up for meals. We’ll take care of the rest. I want you to consider Rachel and me as your family until that cousin of your mother’s gets here.”

Wasn’t it a contradiction in terms for a family member to treat her home as a resort? But what made me far unhappier than my lack of any schedule was the sense that life at Old One Thousand was going on without me. It had a schedule and needed someone there to register it. I did my best to patrol its rooms and porches in spirit. Nonie seemed always to be there waiting, just around a corner or on the other side of a door. Sometimes the Recoverers were there, the ones from her stories, discussing their rates of improvement as the sun passed over the house. Around three o’clock this time of year, as Rachel was being driven away for her riding lesson, they would be gathering up their books and cards and migrating from the south porch to the west porch. And in the background, doing whatever he did in his consulting room (sometimes he wrote poetry: “… ’midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this December morn / a boy is born,” he had begun his ode on the occasion of my father’s birth), presided the watchful spirit of my grandfather Doctor Cam.

Rachel and I swam and had I-bet-you-can’t-do-this contests in the pool while her mother lay in the sun in her two-piece bathing suit, her skinny brown midriff baking to a crisp, her face concealed by a picture hat, leafing through magazines and turning down pages when she saw something she wanted. Rachel and I had a thermos of cold lemonade, and Rachel’s mother had her own thermos, which Rachel said was “spiked,” and eventually Lorena Huff would rise from her deck chair, wiggle her fingers at us coyly, and sway unsteadily toward the house.

Every morning, Rachel and I crunched down the sparkling white drive to the mailbox, Rachel toeing up as much gravel as she could, and by the time we had walked back with the mail, Rachel would have gotten in at least two of her embarrassing questions. These ran the gamut from “Which is worse, having your mother or your grandmother die?” to “Don’t you want to know who your father will marry to look after you?”

I grew more desolate as the week went on. I felt I was neglecting an important duty and losing more of my identity every hour I stayed apart from the rhythms of Old One Thousand. There were times when I was sure that, if I could be there at that very moment, Nonie would find a way to speak to me, and maybe even to appear, which made me all the more desolate.