Perfect Reader Part 17

"She's on faculty, isn't she? It is a faculty house, after all. I'll just call down to the station, find the number of her office, and we'll see if she's there. Put this whole episode to rest so both of you can get on with your day."

There was nothing to be said to that. He got into the cruiser and sat with one leg hanging sloppily out the door, conjuring the obscenity of an unzipped fly. This wouldn't end well. The information was easily attained. In moments, Flora could hear that the officer had Cynthia on the phone.

"This is Doug Daniels, Darwin Campus Security here," he was saying. "I'm sorry to disturb you, ma'am, but I've got a Flora Dempsey here, at your residence 340 Chestnut Lane."

Would Cynthia have her arrested? Did a Darwin Campus Security officer even have the authority to arrest anyone? The editorialists of the Gazette Gazette would be in fits. She could see the headline in the would be in fits. She could see the headline in the Witness: Witness: dempsey daughter reaches new low. dempsey daughter reaches new low.

"According to Ms. Dempsey, you two had an appointment you were unable to keep this afternoon," Officer Daniels went on. "This circ.u.mstance resulted in you giving her permission to enter the premises at 340 Chestnut to retrieve an item. It appears to be a stack of papers."

A silence. Flora stopped breathing. Mrs. Bianchi's glare orbited from Cynthia's house to the cruiser to Flora's face as she strained to hear.

"Uh-huh," Daniels said. "That's right. Very good. Okay, then. Thanks very much."

He approached them slowly, the highlight of his f.u.c.king day. Guess what happened to me today, boys Guess what happened to me today, boys, he'd tell his fellow Division Three cops, Darwin's Finest. Caught the ex-prez's daughter in some petty larceny Caught the ex-prez's daughter in some petty larceny. But then he held out his arms in a gesture of understanding and said, "Ms. Reynolds confirms the story. No cause for alarm. We can all be on our way. Though she's lucky to have such a vigilant neighbor, Mrs. Bianchi. We in law enforcement rely a great deal on responsible citizens like yourself."

Was it a trick, a trap? Why was Cynthia being nice? Her way of apologizing for the bad press? Was she claiming the moral high ground, counting on the malleability of a guilty conscience? Or simply planning to use this information to blackmail Flora, to let her know in some noirish way, The poems see print or I send you to lockup? The poems see print or I send you to lockup?

Mrs. Bianchi and the officer were staring at Flora, waiting for her to leave. She could not return the poems to the house. She was stuck holding the evidence against her.

"Okay, thanks a lot," Flora said, and waved good-bye. "Sorry for the misunderstanding." She walked toward her bike. The officer nodded and got back in his car. Mrs. Bianchi edged away, eyeing Flora over her shoulder.

Flora rode away again, free and clear. But there was no surge of relief. After the excitement of the break-in, the malevolent wind act of a bored G.o.d, the near arrest, and the benevolent pardoning, she felt very tired. She tried to concentrate on the insect noise the wheels made in spinning, but she could barely push the pedals, or keep a firm grip on the handlebars. She couldn't make the short ride home. She could make it just to town. There was a pay phone by the common; she could call someone to pick her up. But the pay phone cost fifty cents-when had that happened? She had no change and no one to call. She could see the windows of Paul's office, and Dr. Berry's below, but she had no great wish to render herself pathetic to either one of them, no urge to return to that building ever again. She would never return to that building; it was decided. She'd cross a small part of Darwin off the list. Excise something. One fewer place to return to. Enough returning to the scene of the crime. Though it might be a nice gesture to present to Dr. Berry as a parting gift the fact that she'd been sleeping in her father's bed-an irresistible Freudian morsel as an adieu.

She propped the Peugeot against the pay phone and sat on the adjacent bench. She pulled the poem she had intended to keep from her back pocket. With it came two business cards: one rather chaste, with the name Bill Curtis, and the t.i.tle Editor, which Cynthia had foisted on her over breakfast at the Spotted Salamander; the other bescriptured-And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. John 1:5-and decreeing Esther Moon, Executive Director and Founder, Intelligent Darwin. Good Lord. How long had it been since she'd washed those jeans? She put the cards back in the pocket and unfolded the poem.

The poem tells of dinners at Ponzu, of watching the two side by side, his daughter "in her day-old braids," and her friend, the Wizard, "neater, stricter." "The first love affair," he writes, "like most won't end well." "She is mine and not my own," the poem goes on, "this other / self I've grown, separates from me, cell-like / and utterly. The truth of Oedipus not Freud's / dirty murder incest romp, but that we / cannot protect our children from their lot." It ends with a conversation between Georgia and Lewis, Georgia young and battered, and Lewis young and battered, too, though in a different way. She claims she is no wizard-how else to explain the fall? No, he counters, it's further proof of wizardry-who else survives such Icarus heights? None of us is unscathed, he says. I was before, she tells him. He tells her, Blame me, if you blame anyone at all; I'm at fault, if someone is. She won't reply but curls her wounded wing around herself and disappears.

"Flora." It was Paul Davies, walking toward her. But he hadn't said it in the nice way, not like the boy you had a crush on acknowledging your presence; he'd been called to the headmaster's office; he'd been caught by the cops. Though it was he who had caught her unprepared.

"Hi, Paul." She tucked the poem away. Was he stalking her?

"Do you have a minute? Do you want to get a cup of coffee?" he asked.

They hadn't spoken since their argument, though as they'd never spoken every day, it was possible to imagine that it was not that they had completely given up on each other, but had simply fallen into a patch of busyness and preoccupation.

He noticed her bike. "So you got that back," he said.

"I'm not in the mood for coffee," Flora said.

"Mind if I sit, then?"

He sat but didn't speak. He looked nervous, and handsome. He played with his hands as if they were some fresh, weird discovery.

"How have you been?" she asked.

"I think I may owe you an apology, Flora."

"For that fight? I don't think so. We both said stupid things. I certainly wish I'd drunk less and said less that night."

"Not for the fight per se."

"Per se?"

"After the fight."

"Not calling? I didn't call, either, Paul. We both behaved childishly. But there's no need to rehash all that. Really."

"I think I may be responsible for the story in the Witness Witness, and I guess, by extension, that nonsense in the Gazette Gazette today." today."

"You think think?" She stared at him, but he would not look at her.

"I told someone about your dad's work, and he told someone else, and then that was it. I saw it in the paper."

Flora lowered her head. She would not throw up in front of him, Paul Davies, Esq., though the revelation was nauseating, her stomach empty and metallic. The worst of it was Cynthia's kindness, Cynthia's generosity, Cynthia saying to Officer Daniels of the elite Darwin squad, Yes, of course she had permission to enter my house. Yes, those papers were hers to take Yes, of course she had permission to enter my house. Yes, those papers were hers to take.

"Please, say something, Flora."

"Why would you do that? You knew I wasn't ready for anyone to know."

"I was so furious, after that fight, I wasn't myself. You seemed so spoiled, so ent.i.tled. And your sense of superiority-as if you were trying to control the way I thought. I felt you didn't deserve your father's poetry, that you had no right to be the person in control."

"For an apology, this is shaping up just great," she said.

He had talked to his friend Jim, the Apostle who edited the online journal, and Jim had told a colleague, and eventually the Darwin College intern who worked for Jim, and whose job it was to troll the Web site for the most scurrilous postings and delete them, heard, and told his friend at the Witness Witness. "At least I think that's what happened," Paul said.

"And the anonymous source-that quote?" Flora asked.

"It was an approximation of what I'd said to Jim, pa.s.sed down second-or thirdhand. Not the world's most responsible journalism."

"Or lawyerism, or boyfriendism," Flora said. "Jesus, Paul."

Paul looked at her in his old curious way. "We all do things we're not particularly proud of, because in the short term they make us feel the smallest bit better. Don't we?"

Flora stood up and moved to her bike, her escape vehicle. As someone who hated to apologize, she accepted that. "So much for attorney-client privilege," she said.

"You going to have me disbarred?"

"It's tempting."

"Is there anything I can do?" he asked. "To make amends?"

She was sure she could think of something.

For Thanksgiving that year, Flora and her mother flew south to see her grandparents and soak up a bit of warmth while her father did G.o.d knows what in the President's House. They lived in a coral-colored world, as old people often did, faded colors for fading lives, in a narrow two-story condo near the beach. Flora's mother had been closest to her father, but now he was losing himself, every day one further idea or story or proper noun missing or gone. He read excerpts from newspaper articles again and again-always the same sentences from the same stories, his memory failing but his mind remarkably consistent. Each morning, Flora's grandmother helped him to bathe, and to shave, and to dress. After breakfast, she'd say, "I've got to go put my face on"-a creepy expression-before disappearing into the bathroom for what felt like hours. Now it was as if she had to put his face on, too.

It was funny how different Flora's mother and grandmother were, one's parents' parents both mystifying and clarifying. Flora had never known her father's parents-they had died when she was young-and so had never seen what it was for him to be the child. But it was as if Joan Dempsey had formed her womanhood to be her mother's opposite. Unlike her mother, she never wore any makeup except lipstick, staining her already dark lips a deeper red-wine stain. Flora's grandmother wore perfume-she smelled like velvet-and had her nails done, and dressed in colors like lavender and mauve. Her mother found scents suffocating and smelled like Marlboros-a smell Flora also liked-and wore, as much as possible, only black. Their politics were similar-they liked to say they came from anarchist stock-and they both loved old songs by Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim. But that was about it.

Flora and her mother shared the guest room upstairs, Flora sleeping on the trundle bed that pulled out from under her mother's twin bed. Joan was annoyed because her mother hadn't made the beds, and had made them dash out for groceries as soon as they arrived.

"What a warm welcome," she complained when they were lying side by side in their two small beds. "It's like she wants us to feel like an inconvenience."

"You should be nicer to Nana," Flora said. "She's having a hard time."

"I'm having a hard time, too," her mother said, turning teary. "She should be nicer to me."

And Flora saw how both things were true, and maybe impossible. She loved her grandmother, who was stylish in an old-lady way and had once been a great beauty, and wore perfume and makeup and let Flora prowl through her jewelry box and try on rings and necklaces and brooches and showed her other ways to be a woman. She didn't let Joan smoke in the house, and so her mother sat outside on the steps like a sullen teenager in her pajamas, ashing beside the potted tomato plants Flora's grandmother watered in the mornings.

On Thanksgiving Day, they were going to some friends of her grandmother, and Flora's mother baked an apple pie-the first time she'd done that since before they moved to Darwin. Then she dropped it on the sidewalk on the way to the car and she cried and the day seemed doomed. But her grandmother's friends were two men named Fred and Jon and their house had a pool and Flora and her mother went swimming and had handstand compet.i.tions, which her grandmother judged, and on the way home Flora was happily full, her fingertips wrinkled like little brains, and she fell asleep against her mother's shoulder.

When they got back to Darwin and their little house on Sunday afternoon, the key turned, but they couldn't get inside. It was as if the door had been nailed shut, and upon further inspection they saw that it had. An envelope rested against the sealed door with her mother's name written across in her father's cryptic handwriting.

"Maybe you should open that," Flora said. "Maybe it explains something."

Her mother rolled her eyes. "I don't want to deal with his s.h.i.t right now."

So they went around to the side of the house and let themselves in the other door and saw that the house had been robbed, everything that could be unplugged gone-coffeemaker, toaster, hair dryer, stereo, television. Also Flora's horse fund-a mason jar stuffed with the part of her allowance she'd been saving since they moved so that one day she could buy a horse of her own to never ride. The letter from her father explained there had been a rash of break-ins along the street where they lived and that the postman had discovered their door hanging wide open and reported it to the police and that Darwin Buildings and Grounds would be over on Monday to repair it.

But the letter also said that the television the burglars had stolen had been his-she had taken it from the bedroom of the President's House and not from the third floor and it should never have been in her house in the first place, she was really only supposed to take the things on the third floor, so if she could just send him a check for two hundred dollars, they'd call it even. Her mother tore up the letter and threw the pieces on the ground and, for the third time in four days, grew tearful, lonely, and rageful.

The worst of it was, Flora had been starting to like him again. It was as though her father wanted her to hate him, or at least didn't care one way or the other if she did. So she obliged. She coated herself in anger, hard as a wrinkled walnut sh.e.l.l.

21.

Darwin Burning.

CYNTHIA HAD PINNED A NOTE to the door: "Flora, Meet me at 280 Main Street. Tomorrow morning, ten o'clock. Please, Flora. Cynthia." to the door: "Flora, Meet me at 280 Main Street. Tomorrow morning, ten o'clock. Please, Flora. Cynthia."

Where was she being summoned? The address was somewhere near town. Some Darwin professor newly rallied to the cause? At the appointed hour, Flora walked, ma.n.u.script in hand, and as the numbers descended, she knew just where she was being led. The Margaret Jackson Homestead. The precursor, the first great Darwin poet. The flamboyant eccentric whose posthumous works had long outlived her early critics.

Cynthia was waiting in the garden. It was quite a setting for a scolding. Swaths of tight-fisted greeny-pink buds drooped from long beds. Other, shorter spring blooms sat like schoolchildren at their feet. Of course, Cynthia would know all the names, Linnaean and colloquial.

"Isn't it exquisite?" she said in greeting.

Flora looked up at the house. Redbrick; Georgian. Not unlike the President's House, built no doubt around the same time. The signature moneyed style of Darwin's nineteenth century.

"I mowed the lawn here the summer before I started college," she told Cynthia. She'd almost forgotten that season of self-inflicted degradation in which, under the employment of Darwin College Buildings and Grounds, she mowed, among other things, the lawn of her old house, the president's mansion, in the long shadows of the terrible fire escape, edged by the cobwebby beauty of trembling wisteria. Her mother had tried to talk her out of it, referencing her "perverse punitive streak"; her father, who avoided dispensing any advice that might be deemed overtly parental-preferring the role of playful compadre, or vaguely disapproving teacher-said nothing. From the president's sloping lawn, one had to look up, neck craned, to see the glare of the tall first-floor windows, to see the green and white of the veranda. An expanse- expanse-that was the word used to describe lazy lawns like these, lawns with tiers and protective hedges, which evoked Henry James and other Americans who'd cultivated their own Europeanness with the zealotry of converts. Flora had at the time recently read The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby, and with this new perspective on her former residence, it occurred to her that it was Tom and Daisy Buchanan's house-another proud container of misery. Minus the culmination of bay, she'd lived in that very house.

"Really, you?" Cynthia laughed. "I can't see you doing that, Flora."

"I had this notion it would be the perfect summer job-outside in the sun all day. Pruning, weeding, mowing. Letting the mind wander and think its own thoughts." But the reality had resembled the fantasy not at all, her mind refusing to wander. "Instead, I thought, Mowing, mowing, mowing."

"That's what I love about gardening," Cynthia said. "How absorbing it is, the concreteness of the tasks. It's a kind of meditation for me."

"Well, it was a kind of madness for me."

Cynthia's expression changed, as if she were counting to three and making herself say something difficult; the pleasantries were over. "I didn't tell the Witness Witness of your father's poems, it wasn't me, Flora. Though I understand why you thought that, and how upset you were about it, and rightly so. And I understand about the house, and the ma.n.u.script." of your father's poems, it wasn't me, Flora. Though I understand why you thought that, and how upset you were about it, and rightly so. And I understand about the house, and the ma.n.u.script."

"Please, Cynthia," Flora said. "Stop being so understanding. I don't deserve it." She gave back the ma.n.u.script.

Cynthia cradled it in one arm and said, looking down at it, "In that case, then, I must say, I'm glad the story is out. This veil of secrecy surrounding your father's work makes the whole thing silly, and sordid. Now we can each think more clearly, see more clearly." She fixed her eyes on Flora, her planned speech gaining momentum. "Did you know during Jackson's lifetime the only poems she was famous for were those she'd collaborated on with her well-known brother? Her natural rhythms invisible, enjambment thwarted, punctuation made more conventional, in general the work so much less modern. It was only after her death that her sister found the hundreds of poems she'd written on her own sequestered in some padlocked chest. An amazing discovery-this secret world your nearest relative had inhabited alongside you. Apparently, the brother went wild with jealousy and there was a great family brawl over what should be done, the usual possibilities entertained-burning, selling, waiting, changing. Understandable, given the circ.u.mstances. The haunting power of marks on paper."

The pedantry of the anecdote, of the grounds, was overmuch. "An instructive parable, Cynthia," Flora said. "That's why you've brought me here? To educate me?"

"Your father was becoming more and more interested in Jackson's work. She was an important influence. What if those poems had never been shared? Think of all the poets-all the writers-she's inspired. Think of the collective loss."

"Do you really think the world would look so different?" Flora said. They were talking of the discovery of poems, not antibiotics.

"What we're dealing with is difficult, Flora, there's no doubt. And we're both doing the best we can. But in the end, it's not about us. It's about your father, the poet."

"We've been through this all before. It is about us. It's about me, and most certainly about you. We're the ones here. We're what's left. And if, as you say, the whole thing is silly, and sordid, why do you care so much?"

"I might ask you the same question."

"Believe me, I ask myself that question every day," Flora said.

Cynthia looked surprised, and then suddenly, splotchy and upset. She grabbed Flora's arm. "They are all I have, Flora. Those poems are all I have from your father. You got everything and I got nothing. And I'm not talking about what I deserve. Lord knows, none of us gets what we truly deserve-really, how can anyone claim to deserve anything? But I lived what was the most important year of my adult life alongside this amazing man-your dad-and now it feels as if that year never happened, as though I invented it. Except for the poems. I can't help feeling he wrote them for me, that he wanted me to have them. You saw the inscription, 'For Cynthia, without whom ...'" She drifted off and released her grasp to wipe tears from her chin. "Why can't you let me have them, Flora? Why can't you let me have something?" something?"

"I don't know," Flora said. She rubbed her arm, marked red from Cynthia's fingers. She wanted to grab the new fists of flowers and tear them from the soil, to uproot the stems until there was only dirt, once hidden, standing where a garden had been. She put her hand around the soft coolness of a bud and squeezed. "I don't know why my father named me his executor, why he left me in charge. Anyone who's paying attention seems to think it was a poor choice. And maybe he would have changed his mind if given more time, or maybe he did it to test me, or to teach me, or to show me something of his world, or maybe it's as clean and simple as the fact that I was his only child and he trusted me to do right by him."

Flora was crying now, too, and she noticed that they were no longer alone in the garden. A bald and taut-skinned middle-aged man, whom she recognized as the head gardener for the college, her former boss, crouched in a chambray shirt and jeans, studiously avoiding looking at them from twenty feet away. "I don't know, Cynthia," she said again. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I should renounce my legal rights and sign the lot over to you and once and for all rid myself of this place."

But Cynthia was already walking away from her, her head bowed, as though contemplating the ground, or her own feet.

Flora waved to the gardener, who either didn't see or pretended politely not to notice. She turned down the steps, through the hedges, and back to the road. The sky had grayed over and a few tentative swollen raindrops fell, leaving dark gumlike stains on the sidewalk.

"Howdy, stranger!" a girl's voice called out. It was Esther Moon, in her ma.s.sive sagging tank, pulled over across the street. "Need a lift?"

As Flora lowered herself onto the crumbling foam of the seat, it began to pour, the noise on the roof like hysterical popcorn kernels trapped in a pan. For a second, Flora thought of Cynthia, caught in the deluge, and felt a tug of something-protectiveness. But she did not suggest they go in search of her. Perhaps she'd taken shelter at the Spotted Salamander.

"You look like you've been crying," Esther said, and before Flora had to answer, added, "I thought you'd be out of here by now."

Flora hadn't the energy to talk. She twisted to take in the empty car seat. "Where's Lily?" she asked.

"At home with my mom-she baby sits most days. You do know it's Wednesday, Flo? A workday, right?"

"Right," Flora said. "Sorry. I must be keeping you from something."

"No, I didn't mean that." The rain relaxed and gave way to the sound of Johnny Cash, sad and throaty. The car still sat on the side of the road. "You okay, Flo? You don't look great."

Flora shook her head. Tears coated her cheeks, slick and hot.

"Oh, Johnny," Esther called out. "Quit it. You're breaking her heart."