Flora had her driving lesson. Finn was teaching her to back the Oldsmobile out of the garage, but she kept sideswiping the garbage can until he said, “That’s enough for today, love, we’ll try again tomorrow,” and backed out for her. Then they proceeded with their usual lesson, stopping and starting and reversing and changing gears, round and round the circular drive Finn and I had restored together.
Then Flora put her casserole in the oven and excused herself for a quick bath because she said she was all sweaty. Finn and I were left by ourselves, which was nice, except I was nervous. Not expecting Flora’s bath, I hadn’t prepared anything to say.
“You must be so proud of your father,” said Finn, following me into the living room. “I hope I can meet him someday.”
“You will. He’s coming home in two weeks and four days. Maybe sooner. But I don’t want to think about it till tomorrow.”
“Which is your birthday.” Finn sat down next to me on the sofa and placed a parcel tied with string on the coffee table. “The wartime wrapping you’ll have to excuse. But I hope you like what’s inside.”
It was a handsome wooden box of colored pencils, accompanied by an artist’s drawing pad. “They’re the kind I use, when I can get them,” said Finn, running his fingers lovingly across the pencils in their separate velvet trenches. “Made in Holland. After supper, we’ll try them out.”
I was taken aback when the freshly bathed Flora reappeared in the blue dress I hadn’t seen her wear since Nonie’s funeral. Its cut and drapery suited her better than any of her other clothes, and she had put on her high heels and some makeup. I felt not only upstaged but put at a disadvantage. I was in my same clothes from the morning and hadn’t been given a chance to wash off our day’s activities.
We ate after the six o’clock news with Lowell Thomas. The big-name evening newscasters themselves had been upstaged because by now everyone had heard the shocking highlights earlier in the day. Blast equal to thousand tons of TNT. Most destructive force ever devised by man. Sixty thousand dead and still counting. The entire Japanese Second Army wiped out on their parade ground while doing morning calisthenics.
“I know it’s unpatriotic,” said Flora, “but I can’t stop feeling horrible about all those dead and burned people.”
“It’s not unpatriotic,” Finn corrected her, “it’s human.”
“How will this affect your chances with that Army board?”
“I’ve been wondering myself. It scotches my chances of getting shipped off to fight the Japs and redeeming my war record. But maybe they’ll find a place for me in demobilization. I can sit behind a desk for a year or two and help send others home.”
“What is scotches?” I asked.
“You scotch a wheel with a wedge,” explained Finn, “to keep it from rolling.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding.
“Well, I’m sorry,” said Flora, blushing through her makeup. “But I’m
“Well, and I’m not sorry that you’re glad,” Finn softly responded.
AFTER SUPPER WE returned to the living room to try out my pencils. There was still plenty of light coming through the west windows. Finn sat next to me and demonstrated how to alter the shade of a color by applying various degrees of pressure. Then he showed how you could blend a red with a yellow to make orange, a blue with a red to make purple, a blue and a yellow to make green, and a red, yellow, and blue to make brown. For these exercises, he used a page from his own sketchbook, which he always carried with him, so I wouldn’t have to mess up my new one.
Flora kept up a steady murmur of accolades as she paced back and forth behind us or perched on the sofa arm on Finn’s side. “This is just so impressive… I can use this with my class at school. Will it work the same with Crayolas?”
“Not exactly,” said Finn. “These are very soft leads. Crayons are mostly wax. But your kids will get the idea.”
Then he said it was time we tried an actual portrait, if Flora would be so good as to sit in the chair and serve as our model.
“Oh no, please,” she protested.
“How will I teach her to draw a portrait, then? Do you see someone else I could ask? Of course, Helen and I could
I thought this was hilarious and it shut Flora up. She took her position obediently in the wing chair and let Finn tell her how he wanted her to arrange herself.
“The first thing I want you to do,” Finn instructed me, “is to fix your eyes on Flora. Then I want you to squint until she gets all blurry and you can see only the shape she makes in the chair.”
“Just her head?”
“No, the whole body. The shape it makes against the chair, but not the chair. Get that shape firmly in your head. The angle of it, where it bears its weight. Now, we’ll take a pencil, this yellow will do, and laying the point sideways on the paper we lightly
I sat paralyzed over my new drawing pad. “What if I make a mistake and ruin my first page?”
“Will we switch, then?” He handed over his pad with the yellow blob. “But will you care to have my drawing on your first page?”
“I wouldn’t mind.” People would think it was my drawing.
“Well, in that case—” He took back the yellow pencil and duplicated the blob in my pad. “There. Now we each have our shape to work with. And inside this shape is a person. Unlike any other person in the world.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Flora with a nervous titter.
Finn gave Flora one of his sweet, accepting looks. He probably looked at Miss Adelaide that way when she remembered one more thing she’d forgotten. “Now,” he said, handing me a blue pencil and taking a darker blue for himself, “we’ll start at the top with the hair on the head, but here, again, we’re after a shape, not a hairstyle. How the cloud of dark sits on the face below… I know, I know, we haven’t done the face yet, but the whole thing’s a package, don’t you see, you’ve got to keep this whole package of a person in your mind, seeing how one thing flows out of another, an arm out of a shoulder, the curve of the body that allows the hand to rest so naturally on the thigh of the crossed leg. The mistake most beginners make is they draw each thing separate and then nothing connects. But we’ve put down our yellow shape to guide us, so we won’t make that mistake.”
“This isn’t working,” I said, after a minute. “Yours already looks like her hair but mine doesn’t.”
“Yours looks fine. Leave it for now and find the curve of the neck in your shape and sketch it in. Great, that’s great. Now we come round the shoulder and round out the arm, and then, er, there’s this fullness” (he was doing Flora’s breast—or bust she would call it) “and notice the shadows it makes against the inside of the arm…”
We continued on like this until a likeness of Flora, the real essence of her presence in the chair, emerged under Finn’s hand.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I make the same marks you do, but mine look different.”
“It’s looking at the model you’re meant to be doing, not at my ‘marks,’” Finn scolded with an affectionate nudge of his arm against mine. “Yours is coming along, wait and see. You must have faith in yourself.”
“That’s exactly what Mrs. Anstruther would have said!” exclaimed Flora from Nonie’s chair.
“Shush,” I said. “You’re the model.”
My body shape, or rather Flora’s as I had drawn it, wasn’t hopeless. Finn’s instructions had protected it from beginner’s anatomical naivete. But when he finally let us fill in the face, I got something wrong and spoiled the whole picture. What made it worse was that I couldn’t locate what I had done wrong. I was furious with myself. I had suppressed a childish giggle while we had been working on Flora’s “bust,” but what if I failed to suppress my childish tears of frustration?
“Honey, I think you’re getting tired,” said Flora.
“You shut up.”
“Ah, now,” Finn sorrowfully chided. “What is it that’s made you cross?”
