Flora

“I ruined the face.” Now a tear escaped. To keep from doing a complete Flora, I silently strung together the filthiest words I knew.

Finn lifted up a layer of the pencil box and extracted something. “Do you see this? It’s called an eraser.”

“Erasers smudge.”

“Not this eraser. It’s made to go with these pencils. There’s also a wee sharpener under here, for when you’ll be needing it for the pencils. Now, how did you ruin the face?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, start at the top. Is it the forehead? The eyes?”

“The eyes, I think.”

“What about them? Don’t be looking at my marks, look at the model.”

“Hers are further apart.”

“Right! Those far-apart eyes are one of her most beguiling features. So, let’s fix them.”

Flora had turned on the lamps before it was time for the 7:45 news we sometimes listened to. I was not sorry to see the summer light fading earlier. It meant school would be starting and my father would be home and Flora would be back in Alabama. H. V. Kaltenborn, or Hans von Kaltenborn, as Nonie liked to call him, had no new horror stories from Japan to offer, but he pointed out in his ominous, rat-a-tat diction that, for all we knew, we had created a Frankenstein’s monster, and with the passage of a little time an enemy might improve it and use it against us.

“If it’s all right with everybody, I’m going to switch to some music,” said Flora.

“That is a lovely dress,” Finn said as she swished past him to the console radio in her high heels. “Doing your portrait, I was thinking there ought to be a special name for its color. Darker than cobalt and purpler than Prussian: ‘twilight blue,’ perhaps.”

If it had been just the two of us she would be barefooted by now. And of course would not be in the “twilight blue” dress.

“Juliet Parker made it for me,” Flora said, finding a dance music station. “She bought the material for herself, but then when Mrs. Anstruther died she wanted me to have something nice for the funeral.”

“I’d like to meet your Juliet Parker,” Finn said.

“Well, who knows? Maybe you will,” said Flora gaily, tapping him on the head as she passed behind the sofa. “I’m going to make us some coffee.”

“Major Glenn Miller,” said Finn, nodding at the radio. “Another irreplaceable mortal whose plane went down.” He shook his head sadly, then sprang to his feet and held out his arms. “Let’s dance, Helen.”

“I don’t dance very well yet.”

“Well, here’s a chance to shorten that ‘yet.’”

“Really, I can’t—”

“Ah, I know what you’re capable of when you say really you can’t. I’ve seen it, remember? I’ve seen you jump into the unknown.”

“Shush,” I said, frowning toward the kitchen as I let him pull me up, like that day he pulled me out of my stupor from the side of the road.

“I know, I know. It’s our secret.”

Annie Rickets and I had devised our own frantic version of jitterbugging, and last summer Mrs. Beale had found some hard-up old couple who had once run an Arthur Murray studio to teach Brian and me (poor Brian) the basic ballroom steps. But with Finn’s palm warm and solid at your back and him guiding you with your joined hands, your movements were in his custody. It was a world apart from two separate bodies striving to “dance.”

“You see?” he crooned as we spun around the threadbare carpet.

“If I was taller I could reach you better.”

“Don’t be in such a rush, darling. I didn’t get my full height till I was seventeen.”

“Don’t stop on account of me,” cried Flora, returning with the tray. “You two look great.” In typical Flora flutter she set everything out on the coffee table. On a plate covered with one of my prewar birthday napkins (sailboats, age six) she had interlaced Fig Newtons with the leftover pound cake, which wouldn’t have been enough by itself. Then with a stagy sigh of contentment, she tucked herself neatly into a corner of the sofa, and made a big show of studying the two portraits of herself in the drawing pads. “Never in my life have I been made such a fuss over. And, you know, I love them both. Each of them shows me a new side of myself.”

As in his earlier drawing, Finn had made her prettier than she was; but what new side of herself had mine revealed to her?

Then Finn commented, as he had once before, that you got to know a person by drawing them. “And sometimes while drawing someone”—he addressed Flora, speaking above the music—“you discover things about yourself in relation to that person.”

“Like what?” Flora was all eagerness.

“Like feelings.” He spoke over my head as he maneuvered me about on the carpet. “Feelings you didn’t know you had about that person.”

Each new time Finn spun me around while continuing to talk to Flora above the music, a certain object began to annoy me. I became vexed, then indignant, then enraged, by the eight-ounce glass of milk set down so emphatically among the cozy coffee things.

The music stopped for a commercial break. “You are going to be a fine dancer,” Finn said, releasing me. “Helen doesn’t know her own powers,” he remarked to Flora.

“You don’t have to tell me that,” said Flora, now busily pouring coffee into the two cups. “I was saying to her only the other day ‘I feel I should pay your father tuition for all the things I’ve learned from you this summer.’”

“It wasn’t the other day, it was this morning,” I corrected. “And you didn’t say you learned them from me, you just said learned.” It suddenly occurred to me that both of them were patronizing me, making me feel important so they could say things to each other over my head.

“You’re right, honey, it was this morning,” Flora instantly capitulated. “My, what a full day it’s been. So many things happening in one day.” She tucked her twilight blue skirt closer to her body, indicating Finn should sit next to her. “Come have your coffee while it’s hot.”

“Did anyone hear me say I wanted milk?” I asked, still standing in the middle of the carpet where Finn had left me.

“Well, no, but you always have a glass at”—she swerved wildly, just avoiding the bedtime word—“the end of the day.”

“Yes, but tonight I want to celebrate my father.” I walked over to the sideboard, and opened the center cabinet, which smelled musty from staying closed all summer. Out came the cognac bottle and the fluted crystal aperitif glass Nonie always used for her nightcaps. I sloshed the glass full, raised it to the orange sky outside the western window, and before Flora could react I drank it down.

“Oh, honey, no—” she said with an intake of a breath, like someone begging a person not to jump off a high building. Except that I had already jumped.

I poured a second glass and raised it to the pair on the sofa. “I’d like to drink to my father for helping make the bomb,” I said.

Finn was the first to collect himself. “Hear, hear,” he said, raising his coffee cup before he’d even put in the cream. “To Helen’s father.”

“To Helen’s father,” Flora barely whispered, raising her cup.

We all three drank. I would have liked to drain the second glass, but my nose and chest were still on fire from the first. I managed a respectable gulp, and then said, in a somewhat shaky voice, “I think I’ll sip the rest of my nightcap in my room.”

“Don’t you think that’s enough, honey?” Flora half-rose to take the glass away from me, but I cut her short.

“Good night, Finn. Thank you very much for the pencils and the art lesson. No, please, don’t get up. Good night, Flora. Thank you for dinner and all the things you did for me today.”

“Would you like for us to come and tell you good night after a while?” Flora asked, sounding defeated.

“No, thank you. I’m really very tired.”

HERE I WAS again on the upholstered bench that fitted into the alcove of Nonie’s