Flora

“Where is it from?”

“A Burnt-Out Case. Dr. Colin, the leprosy doctor, is talking to Querry, the burnt-out architect. The doctor is still opting for evolutionary progress in spite of all the terrible things men have done to one another in the first half of our century.”

“You were reading that again?” I was playing for time while I tried to work out what I thought about the sentence.

“Greene satisfies my perennial cynicism. But that little nugget of hope stuck out like a thorn this time around. What do you make of it? Is such a supposition likely?”

“Not in my lifetime,” I said, sensing his relief and approval through the receiver. “Certainly not in yours,” I generously added.

“Nope. I consider myself lucky to have gotten off with just an eye for eighty thousand and one lives. Well, just thought I’d run it past you.”

We both knew who was meant by the one life added to the final Hiroshima death count.

(“I had planned to leave Oak Ridge the next morning, the morning of your birthday, but then we got the news of the bomb. I went back to my room to leave Harker a note, since he might not have heard due to his deafness, but he had cleared out and left me a note. It said, ‘Fucking hell, Harry, this went too far, there will be retribution.’ When I got back to the site, half my crew had left and those who had remained were exhibiting the usual unsavory aspects of human nature. One announced that God had informed him about the bomb a week ago, but he had been under divine orders not to tell. Several of them petitioned for immediate jeopardy bonuses in case the whole place blew sky-high. One enterprising rogue was collecting bets on how many Japs had been killed and when the war would be over. And then there was the usual quota of worthy fellows cutting their eyes at you for approval: well, here I am, sir, ready to get on with the job, some of us have to be responsible around here. I realized I was more than a little unhinged and decided to leave at once, drive over the mountain before nightfall, and get out of this madness. I hadn’t touched a drop on the premises, but I was looking forward to driving up to the house and surprising you and Flora and then pouring myself a well-earned glass, or maybe more than one. I was thinking about that drink, in fact it was the last thing I can remember thinking about before I rounded the curve. It was dark as hell and then something flew out at me like a ghost. I turned the wheel as hard as I could to miss it, but I obviously didn’t succeed.”)

My father took a long time to recover from the accident. He “sustained,” as the jargon goes, a punctured lung, five cracked ribs, a broken femur (the polio leg), and the loss of his left eye. He referred to the eye almost cavalierly, especially in the old Hammurabi sense of an eye for an eye, and wore a black patch over it, but rarely mentioned the tragicomic dragging lurch, increasingly compounded by arthritis, that became his normal gait. He took even longer to emerge from a severe darkness of spirit in which he seemed to turn his unsparing disgust for human foibles completely against himself. (“Didn’t I tell you they’d find themselves a prince of an assistant principal, a young war hero and social scion with a good word for everybody and willing to coach the track team free of charge while one-eyed, gimpy, bad-assed old Harry takes his perpetual leave of absence?”)

His unlikely redeemer was the Old Mongrel himself, who took him out for long drives, settled his hospital bills, paid for us to have the Huffs’ cook (Lorena and Rachel had vanished into thin air the day after the bombing of Nagasaki, leaving a house that turned out to be rented and furniture that was leased, and without paying anyone except the manly riding teacher, who wisely got her fees in advance. They left behind a swath of delectable rumors, the prevalent one being that they were German spies. I think Annie Rickets’s speculations may have been closer to home: there was no Mr. Huff. Tall stories told by a woman of imagination and some ready cash who moves to town with her child are more easily swallowed in wartime.)

My father went into business with Earl Quarles, much to my amazement and disgust, and the two of them prospered in the postwar housing boom. When I was twelve I was sent to boarding school and became a little snob who vacationed with new friends and went home as seldom as possible—then on to college, followed by a breakdown and lengthy stay in an expensive institution, where I began writing, for therapy, but also out of disdain and boredom, a sort of elegiac tale about the Recoverers and the house my father and the Old Mongrel had torn down to build more of their mountain-view “estates.” Many reconstructions later, it was published as my first novel, House of Clouds.

When the Old Mongrel died in his upper nineties, my father demanded that I get on a plane and show myself at the funeral. Driving me back to the airport afterward, he dropped his bomb.

“Well, dammit, Helen, it was your doing.”

“My doing!”

“You were the one who told him I was the age of the century. And quoted the old doctor’s poem about the ‘cloud-begirded’ December day I was born. All he had to do was go look up the birth records at city hall and count back to his stepsister running away in May. It was there in front of our eyes, but none of us saw it—or wanted to see it. You might as well get used to having his genes. I have. It’s made sense of a lot of things for me. He was a crude, wily old rascal, a raw slice of genuine Americana, and that’s not the end of the world. For me, it was the beginning in many ways.”

These days it is easy to locate most people without leaving your desk. The question becomes what do you want to do with them after you’ve found them? Dr. Brian Beale has a private clinic in the Tidewater. He found me first, in the eighties, and has since critiqued all my books and told me why I wrote them, what I left out, and who everybody was. He’s a much honored member of the psychiatric establishment, one of his sons is in Congress, and he still gets about on metal crutches. He flies to London twice a year to see all the new plays and speaks with a distinct Carolina mountain twang.

Then there are those others you put off tracking down because you’d rather keep them as they were, or keep making them up, recycling them into new incarnations. Finally, when I was nearing the age of Mrs. Jones when she came to live with us for a year, I was just about to go to the Army’s website and do some serious searching, but instead on a hunch I looked up auto parts suppliers in the upstate New York area and found a chain of Finns. It was almost too easy to make the phone call.

“What a shame! You just missed him,” a woman told me.

“Do you happen to know when he’ll be back?”

“Ah, no, what I mean is, we buried him day before yesterday.”

“Oh, dear. I did just miss him, didn’t I?”

“Did you know Grandpop?”

“It was a long time ago. He delivered our groceries one summer at the end of World War Two. He’d just come out of our local military hospital, where he’d been recuperating.”

“Wow, that is a long time ago.”

“Listen, do you mind my asking something? Did he—did he have a good life?”

“Well, I’m probably not the most objective person to ask. I loved him to pieces. We all did. If you mean did he make a big splash in the world, his obituary ran almost an entire page in the Albany Times Union. He was the great benefactor, Grandpop. He was a huge supporter of the arts.”

“That sounds like him,” I said. “Well, I’m sorry I missed him, but it’s been nice talking to you.”

“Wait a minute!” she cried. “I think I know who you are, now. You’re that haunted little girl, aren’t you?”

“I’d never thought of it that way,” I told her, “but I suppose I am.”

Acknowledgements

Moses Cardona at John Hawkins & Associates for his astute first reading of Flora.

Nancy Miller and the house of Bloomsbury for reconnecting me with the passion of publishing.

Rob Neufeld, editor of The Making of a Writer and of our forthcoming volumes Working on the Ending, for his historical research on Asheville during World War II.

The late Gale D. Webbe for the invaluable chapter on his two summers spent working in construction at Oak Ridge in Sawdust and Incense:Worlds that Shape a Priest (St. Hilda’s Press, 1989).