Perfect Reader (3 page)

Georgia, whose mother was a neuroscientist on the Darwin faculty, had been to many such Darwinian celebrations and wore a weary expression of knowingness.

“Why did they name you Georgia?” Flora asked her. “Why not Mississippi?”

“Because of all the famous women Georges,” she said, as though it should be obvious. “My mom thought it would be auspicious.”

“Oh,” Flora said, not knowing any women named George. Did
auspicious
mean suspicious?

“I guess George used to be a woman’s name. You know George Eliot, right?”

Flora nodded. She hated not knowing things. Her mother would say, “You’re not supposed to know everything automatically—we all start out not knowing.” But the not knowing made her feel alone and ashamed. She was forever looking up words in the dictionary so as not to have to ask anyone what they meant. She would look them up nervously, furtively, scouting over her shoulder, straining to hear if someone was coming up behind, not wanting to get caught in the act of discovery. It seemed unfair of life to start you out with nothing, to leave it all up to you. And so many times one mystery would lead to another, the definition as confounding as the word itself, like the time she heard someone say “blow job,” and looked it up, only to be confronted with
fellatio
.

“Why did they name you Flora?” Georgia asked.

“I don’t know. They liked it, I guess.”

“Flora,” Georgia repeated, looking thoughtful and scholarly. “Better than being called Fauna, I think.”

Flora eyed her skeptically. Had she just been insulted?

“I’m precocious,” Georgia explained.

They sat under their chairs on the floor, crouched, fake-whispering. It was rude, and Flora waited for her mother to scold them, but she didn’t. Georgia taught Flora the folk songs they sang at the school she went to—the school Flora would be going to in a week: “The Sloop John B,” “The Titanic,” “The Golden Vanity.” This was life in the country; this was new—singing songs about boats.

Later, walking to the new house with her mother in the light rain while her father lingered with his new colleagues, Flora waited for her to say something, and finally she said, “I saw you made a friend.”

“I guess. What does
precocious
mean?” Her mother was the one person Flora could admit ignorance to, the one person she trusted with her questions, though her mother’s answers were often confusing and possibly unreliable.

“It means pain in the ass,” her mother said.

It was the twilight of the day, the twilight of the season, a late-August twilight. That time of day in that season, the blurring of the blue day into the blue night, the blending of earth and air, made things bigger, fuller. Life froze; paused to revel in itself.

“What did you think of the inauguration?” Flora asked, the new word unwieldy in her mouth.

“A good show. They sure know how to put on a show.”

“Pompous Circumstance?”

Her mother just smiled at her as though from far away.

“Did you meet any new friends?”

“Ah, Flo,” her mother said. “The wife of the boss never has friends.”

2

Paris, Athens, Rome, Darwin

S
HE WOKE UP
ravenous and disoriented. She’d eaten nothing but broth in days, her insides aslosh in briny liquids. Had she eaten at all yesterday? Her dreams had been someone else’s. His, maybe. Dreams full of people she didn’t know, weather she’d never encountered. Even lying down she was light-headed, her jaw stiff and sore as an old man’s joints from a busy night of clenching. Where was she? So many times Flora had wished to run away, to leave everyone she knew, everything but her own skin behind—even her own skin if she could—but she had never managed it, unless you counted the time nearly twenty years ago when she and Georgia ran away from school, or the time a year later when she did it again, alone, but then she had run away to the house she lived in, and now, if you thought about it, she had done the same thing, run away to her father’s house, run away home.

Her
house: She was a landowner, a mint member of the landed gentry, a different Flora, financially, than she’d been a month before. In addition to leaving Flora the house—which he owned free and clear—and his pension and savings, minus five thousand dollars, which went to Mrs. J., her father had named her his literary executor: the most formal title ever bestowed on her, a grown-up title. It was all very organized;
he was a gentleman till the end
. But what did it mean to inherit words? All those orphaned words, words she did not want to read. She was their guardian. They were peeking sorrowfully out at her from their manila folder in her suitcase downstairs and from the piles on the study desk, woeing their bad luck in life in ending up with her. His LPs he’d left to Rubie—his best friend, Ira Rubenstein—with the exception of his opera collection, which went to Flora. And most of the books also went to Flora, except his first editions and other rare things, which he’d left to the college.

“Nothing for me, after all those years of service?” her mother had asked, only half a joke.

Flora grabbed her sneakers and coat from their puddle on the floor and went downstairs. From the body bag she extracted fresh shirt and socks. In the downstairs bathroom she doused her face and examined it. Not too deranged. Certainly not for Darwin. She closed the front door without locking it and walked into town.

Darwin in November looked bleak, the streets emptied of life, as though posing for a Hopper. The cursed spot next to the post office, which welcomed a new restaurant of some new ethnicity with every passing season, was in a Burmese incarnation. The art-house movie theater, still playing its obscure Romanian films, as desultory as ever—how was it hanging on? A front, surely. Maybe all the businesses surrounding the town common were mere facades, elaborate stage sets of the cozy academic enclave. One solid push would knock them over. The banner above Pleasant Street advertised an out-of-date anti–Columbus Day rally.

At Gus Simonds’s shop, Flora filled a basket with milk and eggs, bread and coffee. Hungry for the first time in days, she couldn’t see past breakfast. Her fingers felt more robust in the faded light of morning, but she kept her mittens on inside, in case. Gus’s had long been the place to buy basics—the makings of a modest meal, new notebooks for school, greeting cards, Halloween costumes, and green-and-gold Darwin College paraphernalia. Flora’s favorite T-shirt growing up had been one that listed P
ARIS
, A
THENS
, R
OME
, D
ARWIN
. Next to each word stood a simple rendering of the iconic structure—Eiffel Tower, Parthenon, Colosseum, and the college library. As with so many Darwinian outputs, it was difficult to read the tone: self-deprecating or self-important?

Gus was a man of indeterminate age. He could pass for fifty, but then again, he might be nearing his seventies. His colorless hair matched the morning—not quite gray, though no longer blond—a little like her father’s hair. His face had the wide wrinkles of a man who spent his days outside in the sun. He looked misplaced-caged, almost—standing behind his register.

“Flora,” he said gently, recognizing her as she pulled her hat off.

“Gus,” she said back.

“You’ve come home.”

“Here I am,” she said.

“I miss your old man,” he told her. “Really I do. This town won’t be the same without him. You know, he came in here with Larks for the paper every morning at seven, like clockwork. Often my first customer. My first words spoken were to him. We started our days together.” Flora added the local newspaper,
The Daily Darwin Gazette
, to her pile of groceries. It was nearly eleven. “Where is Larks anyway?” Gus asked.

“Oh, back at the house.” The little lie easier than explaining.

“Sports scores,” Gus went on. “We spent a lot of time on that. He liked to talk games, and to hear them recounted. We filled each other in on what we’d missed.”

Her father had been famous in her family (if one can be famous among two other people) for the enthusiasm with which he offered meticulous plot summaries of films and books. The telling often took longer than the watching or reading. Most of all, he loved to reveal surprise endings. “Are you planning to see it?” he’d ask. An answer of “Yes” was clearly wrong—disappointing, and a little rude.

“How long are you staying?” Gus asked.

“Not sure. As long as it all takes, I guess.” An evasion, but Gus nodded.

“You’ll let me know if you need anything, I hope.” He awkwardly handed her the bag. “It’s on me, Flora.”

“Don’t be silly—how much do I owe you?”

“No, I mean it. Don’t say another word. You know how your dad always overpaid. When he said ‘Keep the change,’ too often that meant change for a twenty off twelve dollars of tennis balls. I owe him.”

“This once,” Flora said. “Then we call it even. I pay my way or I stop coming back.”

Gus grinned at her. “You’ll be back. This is Darwin, Flora. Where else will you go?”

Leaving the shop, Flora thought she saw Esther Moon—a lost friend from high school—parking. Flora recognized the car first—an enormous, old, weirdly symmetrical Chevy, like a child’s drawing of a car, the ugliest car ever made, Esther had liked to say. She’d bought it for one dollar from a Darwin historian who’d been desperate to be rid of it. The car couldn’t still be alive. It couldn’t have outlived her father, was Flora’s thought. But then, there was a car seat in the back, with a child inside, a further impossibility. Esther Moon could not be a parent. A friend Flora considered more responsible had gotten pregnant the year before at age twenty-seven, and a part of her had been shocked to find it not a scandal requiring adult intervention and furious gossiping. When had pregnancy, of all things, become acceptable? And even if that mother were Esther, talking to her now, answering questions like “How are you?” was not an option. Flora didn’t know how to answer the standard questions anymore: “How are you?” “What are your plans?” “Where do you live?” For the time being, all were stumpers. Easier not to be asked. She’d never understood with those questions anyway how much honesty people wanted in return.

She decided on the long way back, through campus. The air was cool, but fresh. The leaves were down and gone, but the grass on the common clung to the last of its New England green. She could see the tall rhododendron bushes barricading the President’s House, but she crossed the street and walked toward the quad instead. An eerily peopleless landscape: Where were the students? Where the professoriat? But what did she want? She dreaded chance encounters with people she’d once known—those warm smiles of recognition homing in on her, missile-like—but then she felt disgruntled if she made it through without being sighted.

In town, in Darwin, she’d always been daughter-of. It was all, when it came to her, relative. A strange thing, recognition by association. At once flattering and diminishing. Teachers taking attendance on the first day of school asking obsequiously, “Are you, by chance, related to
Lewis
Dempsey?” Flora reddening, nodding, conceding: “My dad.” The recognition more embarrassing even than those unpronounceable hyphenated names so many of her classmates had been saddled with. “This town won’t be the same without him,” Gus had offered. Was that true, or something one said? Her father had a prominent place in Darwin as president, and then president emeritus. As scholars went, he’d been known; “a populist critic” he’d been called by admirers and detractors alike. His first book,
Reader as Understander
, tracing the history of how poetry—from Shakespeare to Stevens—was read in its day, sold well, and not just among rivals and graduate students; it won awards and accolades; it had become a book club favorite. At once learned and mass-market. People who did not read poetry had read his book, or at least bought it. Within the confines of the town, her father’s life had been quite public, and so his death had been public. A sudden, public death made people vulnerable, aware of the risks of living. No one liked that kind of awareness, or the people who provided it. Who knew, they might be contagious. Perhaps the town was relieved he was gone, the last of the Dempseys finally purged—though there she was, another one popping up like a rogue mushroom that refuses to be rooted out. Or was all that just narcissism? Again: self-important or self-deprecating? Was the notion of being reviled more palatable than the thought of being, like so much in life, simply tolerated? To most people who had known her father, his death was likely like any other—a cause for sadness, but sadness on the normal scale. The town would be the same for them.

It had been over a year since she’d returned to Darwin, though weeks ago she’d come close, as far as the hospital outside of town, with her mother, to see the body. She had needed to see him, needed to see that he was really dead. Her nerves jittered, like she didn’t know the etiquette. Hysterics seemed appropriate, but didn’t arrive. As her mother stood beside her, she tried to remember the last time the three of them had been alone in a room together. A long time ago, another life. It was uncomfortable—it had long been—to have the two of them in the same place, and she didn’t like her mother to see her father not looking well. Perverse, but that was her thought. His body, to his neck, was covered with a half-blanket, half-tarp, and his neck and earlobes were ruddy from—the recognition impossible to avoid—freezer burn. But it was her mother who had touched him first, who put her hand on his hair in an affectionate way and said, “Oh, Lew,” as if he’d gone and done something truly unreasonable, and so Flora saw that she could press her mouth to his forehead and feel the terrible coldness of his changing skin and not regret not having done it.

“Do you want to be alone with him?” her mother had asked, and Flora told her no, and then she asked, “Do you want to cut a piece of his hair?” and the thought of asking the staff for scissors filled Flora with worry, as if they might suspect her of some barbaric act, but it turned out her mother had a tiny pair in her purse, and she cut the hair, which was a soft gray that moved toward a yellowish white, and still wavy—her mother said that, “Still wavy,” and Flora had been thinking the same thing, though why
still
, why would death have straightened his hair out? And Flora had signed the papers she needed to sign and they had turned back around, back to the city, away from Darwin.

There was the Darwin College chapel—an imposing stone fortress, its delicate white steeple like an ill-fitting cap—where in a matter of weeks his memorial would be held. The same chapel her parents had brought her to as a child to hear the undergraduate a cappella groups perform their wildly harmonized renditions of “Yesterday” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The same chapel that held the annual holiday Vespers, in which celebration Flora, a self-declared agnostic from the age of six, had once read a short excerpt from the Gospel of Luke. The same chapel where her father had hosted academic forums on “The Poet as Prose Artist,” and “The Fin de Siècle.”
Fantasy Echo
, she had misheard at the time, and assumed that was an important term of poetry: the fantasy echo. Like a chorus or refrain, but more mysterious and ghostly. The same chapel where he had mourned other dead scholars over the years—and yet not the same: those memories long layered there less convincing now the eulogizer was to be eulogized. Had it really been he who’d done such things, who’d been there all along?

He’d been a wonderful speaker. Witty and canny, with the easy appearance (though a false one) of off-the-cuffness. He always prepared. “He could work a room,” her mother would put it. But that was unfair. He was the same with everyone he met, and this authenticity radiated, and pulled people in toward him. Flora felt herself so changeable, and found that quality in him miraculous. She even felt she looked different from day to day: Something about her face hadn’t yet gelled; her self hadn’t gelled. To be so constant, so reliably oneself, what would that feel like? Was yourself something you became? Had he been like that—himself—even at her age?

Flora wound her way around the two oldest dorms, built in the early 1800s, North and South (“Here” and “There,” her mother had called them), humble redbrick twins, and down to College Hill, which offered the best views of the mountains and, in winter, the best sledding. A dip at the foot sent you flying above your sled and then, at the moment of reunion, thudding painfully back to earth. As a child, the pain had been part of the fun, falling under the category of pain/pleasure, like a loose tooth you trouble with your tongue, or like the time she and Georgia had given themselves paper cuts, tracing the lines on their palms and fingers till they were red and raw.