Flora

whether she was eligible to take the sacrament or not. At the conclusion of his sermon, Father McFall had asked us from the pulpit to join him in saying the Prayer for a Sick Child. Brian Beale, he announced, had come down with polio over the weekend.

Father McFall himself drove us home. “When I saw you from the pulpit, Helen, I realized you hadn’t heard about Brian.”

Flora sat in front with the rector, who was diplomatically grilling her. He began by saying that he had been among the listeners when she was reading Mrs. Anstruther’s letters. Next came cordial inquiries about her Alabama life, her plans for the future, and her summer plans for the two of us. (“Though some activities may have to be forfeited, with this polio outbreak.”)

Brian had gone swimming at the municipal lake, which was now closed; one other child, a little girl, had been stricken and was in an iron lung.

“But his mother never lets him go to the municipal lake,” I protested from the backseat. “Mrs. Beale is scared silly of diseases.”

“Well, this time, rightly so. But it was a hot day and Brian was lonely and bored, so she gave in and took him and even went in the lake herself. She has scarcely left his bedside at the hospital.”

“Does this mean Brian is going to be crippled?”

“We’re taking it a step at a time, Helen.”

Though it gave his old Ford sedan a severe shaking, Father McFall allowed himself no comment on our driveway. I remembered to say, “Won’t you come in?” as Nonie always did when people brought me home, but he said he had hospital visits to make.

“Will you see Brian?”

“I’m headed straight there. Do you have a message for him?”

“Tell him I said please get better soon.”

Tell him I’m sorry. It was my fault.

“I’d like to visit you two during the week, if that’s all right. I’ll phone first,” Father McFall said in parting.

Inside the screen door, we found my Keds tied together with a ribbon. There was no note.

It was a hot day and Brian was lonely and bored.

If I had been there, he wouldn’t have been either of those things. We would have been in our outdoor sanctuary under the trees in his fenced-in backyard, which was visible enough from an upstairs window for his mother to spy on us. We would have drunk her iced apple juice and played Brian’s favorite game, in which he was either auditioning before a hard-to-please New York director (me) for a lead role or being coached by the director in his role.

If I had stayed at Brian’s last week rather than languishing in luxury at the Huffs’, he would have been in church this morning. As I passed his pew, his princely little profile would have swiveled just enough to beam me a possessive greeting: didn’t we have fun this past week? After church, the Beales would have driven Flora and me back to Old One Thousand and maybe Mrs. Beale would have let him stay overnight. Flora would have made hot biscuits to go with the ham, and for dessert there would have been more of the pound cake she had brought in the suitcase from Alabama. After supper, Brian would have sat down at our out-of-tune piano and picked out some show tunes, and Flora would have praised him and remarked happily on what a nice evening we were having, and then she would have excused herself and retired to the Willow Fanning room. And Brian and I, as we had done since we became spend-the-night friends back in first grade, would have separated to undress and then reconvened in either my room or his, which was my grandfather’s old consulting room. We would have snuggled hip to hip in our pajamas on top of the spread, covering our knees with a quilt, and taken turns reading aloud. I was the faster sight reader, but Brian liked to practice his delivery and his English accent. Sometimes we read from the books we had outgrown for the sake of doing the parts. He was always Eeyore and Piglet and I was always Pooh.

All Sunday afternoon Flora kept watching me mournfully as though another member of my family had died and she was expecting me to fall to pieces any minute. “Let me know if I can do anything, honey,” she kept saying.

“Don’t you have anything you need to do?” I was finally driven to ask.

She looked hurt, then recovered herself and said she had been hoping to use her time off to prepare sample lesson plans for whichever job came through. She had interviewed for three: one for sixth grade and two for fifth.

“Then why don’t you go and do that?” I said.

But as I prowled around downstairs after getting rid of Flora, I felt the house ignoring my existence. I kicked open the kitchen screen door, noticing for the first time that the bottom board, where my foot always landed, had split.

I decided to walk completely around the house and force it to acknowledge me. The day was still under that stubborn haze that withholds either rain or sunshine.

When was the last time I had walked all the way around this house? It seemed that for years we had climbed into our cars and gone somewhere and come back and gone into the house. When was the last time anyone had walked around this house? This made me think of Brian, who might never be able to walk around his house again. Other thoughts came. I pushed them away until all that was left was the forlorn scene I was walking through. Everywhere things were falling apart. Peeling paint, missing roof tiles, an unattached downspout swinging tipsily out from a roof gutter. The former “front lawn” had become a weedy slope ending in unkempt woods, where two broken old trees had collapsed against each other and were rotting together. Did I really remember a lawn green and smooth enough for me to roll down, over and over again? Who had been with me? A woman dressed to go somewhere else, looking off into the distance. There was discontent in the air. Was it mine, or hers, or just the day in general? Was I remembering my mother or was my memory as unreliable as my father’s memory of my grandfather’s shortcut to town? It seemed hard to believe that when the Recoverers took their constitutionals on this lawn they could have looked out through healthy, upright trees and seen the mountains. Yet a charming recovering drunk, Starling Peake, had painted a small canvas that hung on our living room wall, testifying to this lost view. “Poor Starling,” Nonie would say. “He let us down, but he was happy the day he painted that picture.”

What had my mother seen when my father brought her to Old One Thousand for the first time? “It must be wonderful to live in a house like this”: those were her first words to my grandmother. Could the house have disintegrated that much in twelve years, or had my mother been being polite, or had she been more worried about the impression she made and not really noticing what was in front of her? Or had it seemed like a grand house, compared to what she had been used to? The way Flora talked, the Alabama house seemed far from grand.

At last I reached the garage, where yesterday, from the window of my room, I had spotted the unsightly new weeds blocking the entrance. Now, as I wrenched open the garage doors, I imagined those weeds shrieking as I crushed them flat. With a heavy sigh I climbed into the driver’s seat of Nonie’s car and laid my face down on the steering wheel. The dull heat pressed in. Spit trickled out of my mouth onto the hot leather. I began to feel funny, but something told me that I would have to endure it if I wanted anything to change. I had never fainted before, but Nonie had often described what it felt like. Then I must have lost consciousness for a second or two. The next thing I knew, I was sliding down from the seat and leaving the car.

That’s right, darling. Now close the garage doors. You’ll come back later when it’s cooler and shear those nasty old weeds flat to the ground with the kitchen scissors. We can’t fix everything at once, but this will be a gesture in the right direction. And I want you to move into my room. It was my place and now it will be yours. When Mrs. Jones comes on Tuesday, ask her to prepare the room for you. Tell her I came to you in a dream and said to do this. Mrs. Jones respects dreams and is partial to the supernatural. Remember how provoked I was when I found out she was telling you those stories about her little dead daughter, Rosemary, and that uncle who kept speaking to her through a crow. But then you and I had a little talk, you couldn’t have been more than five at the time, and you said, “Don’t worry, Nonie, I don’t believe in her ghosts, but I do like the stories.” And I said, “All right, then, as long as you know the difference.”

VII.