Flora

to ask, but something about Finn’s countenance held me back. If this had been in a fairy tale, a magician might had encased Finn in a lifelike mask and said, “You are safe behind this mask unless someone says something that can crack it. You need to guard against this happening or you’ll be destroyed.” I must have wanted Finn not to be destroyed more than I craved to have the answers to things only he could tell me because I held back, though it was very hard.

There was the old carpetbag in which she had carried the filled mason jars, Uncle Sam’s apple-cured ham, and her special flour (“I never go anywhere anymore without my self-rising flour…”), and there was the suitcase that, aside from underwear and some sanitary napkins discreetly concealed in hand-sewn wrappers, had contained the sack of cornmeal, tea bags, a cake in a tin box, and the wax paper parcels of Juliet Parker’s herbs.

Without the food, all the clothes that had arrived later in the box fitted easily into the suitcase. We did the closet first, and Finn showed me how to fold blouses in three parts, Army-style.

“You remember, Helen, that day on the walk, when we were telling our family histories, and I said I had a brother?”

“Yes.”

“And you asked me whether he was jealous when I got to go to America, and I cut you short.”

“You said, ‘That’s another story,’ and that it was enough about you.”

“What a memory you have! Well, now I want to tell you about Conan. When he was fourteen, Bill and Grace, my adoptive parents, invited him to come to Albany for a long visit. I was sixteen by then and had been with them for six years. Things weren’t good back in Ireland, my father was ill and unlikely to work again, and it was sort of assumed by all in an unsaid way that if Conan wanted to stay on with us in America he could. Well, he was over the moon with joy. Now I’ll get to the sad part quickly because there’s no use drawing it out. A week before he was to sail, he went into town to buy presents for us, and he was gunned down on the street.”

“You mean he was killed?”

“Shot right through the heart.”

“But why?”

“Because Ireland’s just that way now. It’s like your Civil War, only the two sides don’t wear uniforms and fight out in the open. They mistook him for another man’s red-haired son. All of us were heartbroken, but then as time went on I became sure I was the one responsible for his death.”

“How could you be?”

“Ah, because I had written letters praising everything, bragging about my good fortune, making him want my life.”

“But that doesn’t make you responsible—”

“Don’t rush me, darling. It doesn’t, but I felt that it did. Then the war started and I joined up and things got better until I lost my friend Barney, or until his mother came to see me and said she wished her son had been clever enough to get out when I had. After that, the two sorrows linked up—or, no, a better way to put it is that the weight of Barney’s death piled on top of Conan’s death made me feel so unworthy I didn’t want to live. Of course I didn’t understand the mechanics of all this going on inside me until the mind doctors explained it after my little failed attempt to extinguish myself. Now you’re wondering why I’m telling you this story, I can see it all over your face, Helen.”

“Why are you?”

“Because it may be useful to you if ever you start feeling that something bad that happened is all your fault. Fate is far more complicated than that, and thinking you’re in charge of it is egotistical and will only make you sick and waste your life. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes.”

“Now, where are the rest of her things?”

“There’s just what’s in those drawers.”

I had been dreading the drawers because I hadn’t decided what to do about the top one. I wanted to keep Nonie’s letters, but I also wanted Finn to respect me and I hadn’t figured a way to achieve both things. So I started with the bottom two drawers, leaving the top for last. Her stockings and lingerie and the hand-sewn wrappers in which she stored her sanitary pads. She hadn’t used up the second supply, which had come with her box of clothes. I was pleased with my tactfulness as I took charge of these very personal items, tucking them away in the suitcase with my own hands so he wouldn’t have to touch them and be embarrassed.

Finn glanced at his watch. It could no longer be postponed, the top drawer. But it was not as I had last seen it. On the left was Juliet Parker’s faithful stack of summer letters, but on the other side, where Nonie’s letters had been, was a package done up in gift paper I recognized from the stash of old wrappings from Nonie’s deep desk drawer. My first thought was that if Flora had gone snooping in our drawers, even in the interest of wrapping a present for me, then it sort of equaled out my intrusions into hers.

“These are letters from Juliet Parker.” I handed over the stack to Finn. “She wrote every single week.” I still couldn’t say Flora’s name aloud. “This other… I don’t know.” For me to say there used to be another pile of letters in here would be to admit I’d been snooping.

“It looks like a present,” Finn said.

“I know, but—”

“It might be for you. For your birthday.”

“But there’s no card.”

“Well, maybe there was no time for a card. Why don’t you open it?”

“I don’t —If you think it’s all right.”

“I know it’s all right,” he said, making a noble effort not to be caught looking at his watch again.

Inside were Nonie’s letters, all done up neat and tight in their ribbon. The folded note inside said,

Dear Helen, I hand these over to you, on your eleventh birthday. May they sustain and guide you as they have me. There are some personal parts, but I didn’t want to black things out like in those censored letters from soldiers overseas. It would seem an insult to her. I will miss these precious letters but you have taught me so many things I’m grateful for, which I will try to incorporate into my life and my teaching.

Love from your admiring cousin, Flora Waring.

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t look at him. It seemed I also was encased in a mask that one wrong word or move could crack. “Did you know about this?”

“I did. We talked it over. She said you had asked to read them, but she was worried some parts were too old for you. Then she thought about it some more and decided you would grow into them. She said she wanted to give you something you’d treasure and the letters were the best thing she had.”

XXX.

I think of Mrs. Jones, who was seventy that summer, driving after dark by herself to stand among the crowd gathered at the lake and say aloud, “Stella Reeve, you are not forgotten,” every time a pretty firework went up in the sky. Beryl Jones didn’t even know Stella Reeve, the little girl who had caught polio at the lake and died a few days later. She had only read about her in the newspaper, but she did it because her dear dead Rosemary, who in life had loved to make little memorial ceremonies, had suggested it.

I spent all those days and nights with Flora the summer I was ten and she was twenty-two: three weeks of June, all of July, and the first six days of August. I thought I knew all there was to know about her, but she has since become one of my profoundest teachers, though she never got to stand in front of a real class and teach.

These pages are for her. They are my attempt to stand among the crowd and say aloud for all to hear, “Flora Waring, you are not forgotten.”

“I came across this sentence I wanted to run by you,” my father said. This was back in the seventies. We were talking on the phone. There had been years when we didn’t talk, but now we had started again. “Here it is. I wrote it down for the next time you took it into your head to honor me with a call: ‘Suppose love were to evolve as rapidly in our brains as technical skill has done.’ What do you make of that?”