Flora

Flora was to arrive on a midmorning Saturday train from Birmingham, after a long layover in Columbia, and Mrs. Huff kept warning me that the poor girl would probably be exhausted after sitting up all night and would need to rest before beginning her duties. “Your mother’s cousin is welcome to come back here, Helen. We’ll keep the resort going for you two awhile longer. We can provide everything you need.”

“Thank you, but I really need to get home.” Lorena Huff meant well, but I was starting to feel bludgeoned by her hospitality.

The Flora who emerged from the train looked uncharacteristically in charge. In a simple gray suit sprigged with tiny white flowers, her hair secured in a businesslike knot beneath a little hat with a demure veil, she could pass for the fancy governess Mrs. Huff had accused my father of hiring. I could see Lorena Huff revising her estimate of the emotional girl she had seen reading Nonie’s letters at the funeral reception.

I ran to Flora and flung my arms around her.

“My goodness!” she exclaimed, surprised. “You seem glad to see me.”

“Let’s go straight home,” I hissed into her neck.

“Well, of course,” she said. “Where else would we go?”

“Just don’t accept any invitation, okay?”

“Okay,” she repeated, giving my shoulders an encouraging little shake before stepping over to greet Mrs. Huff and Rachel. The dreaded invitation was offered, and I was impressed at how maturely Flora got out of it.

“No, I’m not at all exhausted,” she said. “I brought Mrs. Anstruther’s letters to keep me company during the trip. They always inspire me. I read them over, and it was like hearing her voice tell me what to do next. Helen’s grandmother and I corresponded for six years, you know. You’ve taken such good care of Helen, Mrs. Huff. Just look how brown these girls are! But now I want to get her right home and settle us into our summer routine.”

However, Flora’s arrival that day was to mark the high point of my faith in her.

IV.

My one solace during the week at the Huffs’ had been planning the historical tour of the house I would give Flora the day she arrived. I had played it back and forth in my head, room by room, hearing my own narrating voice. First thing, we’d head straight up to settle her in her room. Flora had slept in this room on her two previous visits to this house, first when she stayed on after my mother’s funeral and then back in March, when she came up for Nonie’s funeral. She had already been told we called this upstairs front room, which opened out on the west porch, the Willow Fanning room, after a Recoverer who had stayed in it a year and a half while convalescing from a nervous breakdown. But there were other layers to reveal, the sort you wouldn’t tell a regular guest, not even a cousin visiting for family funerals. I had planned to drop a few hints about my father’s attachment to Willow Fanning when he was sixteen, maybe even going so far as to foreshadow their ill-fated elopement. My father shouldn’t mind, he was “an old guy” now, as he kept saying, and if he did mind, well, too bad. It was he who had chosen to make Flora an intimate of our family for the summer. I would tell just enough to make her feel she was being inducted into a private family story, and if she proved a worthy listener I would dole out more details. I might also allude to other noteworthy Recoverers on Flora’s first day. The point was to draw her into the ways of Old One Thousand and make her my ally in keeping things going the way they had always been. And what better start than Flora’s having just reread Nonie’s letters on the train!

But Flora completely derailed my plans by making us stop first in the kitchen, where she proceeded to unpack her luggage. Out of an old carpetbag, whose threadbare state had embarrassed me when Lorena Huff was lifting it into the back of her station wagon, came a sack of flour, filled mason jars, and an entire ham. And then from her suitcase Flora parted a meager layer of personal garments and lifted out a sack of cornmeal, which she held in one arm like a baby while she plucked out tea bags, a tin cake box, and some wax paper parcels of what looked like dead grass. With a sigh of fulfillment she deposited these items on the counter.

“You didn’t need to bring tea bags,” I said. “And we already have flour and cornmeal.”

“Well, I wasn’t sure. And I never go anywhere anymore without my self-rising flour. In a pinch, you can make biscuits with it and mayonnaise. I baked them for my teacher-training group last winter and they came out perfect every time. And this cornmeal is stone-ground at a mill near where we live. Now, Helen, you’ll have to show me where everything goes.”

“What are those dried-up old things in the wax paper?”

“These are Juliet’s famous herbs. For spaghetti sauce and to enhance our everyday dishes.”

“Juliet who?”

“Juliet Parker. Don’t you know her name? She raised your mother and me.”

“You mean that old Negro who lived with you?”

“There’s a lot more to Juliet than that. And she’s not old. Now this apple-cured ham is from your uncle Sam. He picked it out especially for you.”

“Uncle Sam owns the meat market and has been separated from his wife for ages and ages,” I said.

Flora needed to know that I was familiar with the names that mattered in my mother’s past.

“Well, he’s the part owner with his friend Ben Timms. Ben and your uncle Sam and my daddy worked in the iron mines together when they were young. Uncle Sam is getting remarried. I mean he and Aunt Garnet are going to get remarried. They were never divorced, but they want to renew their vows and make a fresh beginning. Isn’t that sweet?”

I stared at Flora, still wearing her little hat with the demure veil, so proudly unloading all this foreign food and all these people with their complications into our house.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. Something in my face must have sapped the confidence she had brought with her on the train. Already I was learning how effectively she could be managed by a simple look of disdain.

“I was just thinking where all this stuff should go,” I said.

“Juliet and I wanted to be sure I brought enough to give you wholesome meals over the weekend. We’ll order whatever else we need from the grocery store on Monday.”

“Why do we have to order? We can go and get whatever we need in Nonie’s car.”

“Oh dear, I thought your father would have explained. I don’t drive.”

“Do you mean you can’t, or what?”

“I never learned. None of us did. We didn’t have a car, so there was no need.”

“But how are we going to get anywhere?”

“Your father has set up an account for us at the store. They make lots of deliveries because of the gas rationing. All we have to do is make a list and call up. We don’t even have to pay when they bring it. It’s all been arranged by your father, isn’t that nice?”

“But how will we get to church?”

“I thought maybe we could go down that shortcut your grandfather built for his patients, so they could walk to the village. Your father said you’d show me.”

“That’s impossible! That shortcut is completely grown over, it’s dangerous!”

What had my father been thinking? In its heyday the steep path down through the woods to the bottom of the road had dispensed with a mile’s worth of Sunset Drive’s hairpin curves. My grandfather had had the stepping- stones brought in from a quarry at his own expense; the residents on lower loops of the road, who would also profit from the shortcut, had granted him rights-of-way for his project. But that was almost thirty years ago, when my sixteen-year-old father and Willow Fanning had used it for their getaway. Surely he was not still remembering the path as it was then. Many of the stones were now upended or missing and the pine railings rotted out. Where had I been when my father was dispensing his obsolete information to Flora?

After we got the Alabama foodstuffs put away (Flora was thrilled to discover some empty cocktail olive jars in the pantry, just the right size for “Juliet’s famous herbs”), we climbed the stairs and went down the hall to her room at the front of the house. I had lost all enthusiasm for my tour. It occurred to me now that it would be wiser to keep our family stories separate from Flora’s. I lolled in the doorway of the Willow Fanning room and let Flora prattle on as she hung up her few garments and deposited the rest of her things in the freshly papered drawers that Mrs. Jones, who cleaned on Tuesdays, had prepared. Next to her underwear, Flora slid in some hand-sewn satin envelopes.