4

Nighttimes

IN FLORA’S LITTLE APARTMENT in the city, there were two ways in: the thick front door bejeweled with chain and bolt, and the metal-gated window that led to the fire escape. People called the country safe, but in her father’s house, every thin pane of glass on each of the ground-floor windows asked to be broken with a casually thrown rock, and every door to the outside (three total) looked a formality, a token gesture to security. Even the exterior walls felt meager, insubstantial boundaries between inside and out. The house was built in the 1860s and spoke the language of creaks and moans that all old houses speak. When the heat came on, the hot water rushing through the pipes, the house made a great fuss, letting one know how taxing one’s selfish need for warmth was on its old bones. “I like a house that tells you how it feels,” her father told her when she’d complained on a visit. “It’s letting us know it’s still with us.” But the noises were ominous. Flora heard the whispers of voices in the pipes—a steady murmuring, like a cocktail party next door she tried to ignore. Where was the line exactly between loneliness and insanity? And how would she know if—when—she transgressed?

With the lights out, the house was impenetrable, so dark it almost ceased to exist. With the lights on, it was a giant aquarium-Flora a bottom-dwelling flounder, perfectly visible to the outside world, which was perfectly invisible to her. Anyone might be peering in, or no one, watching her as she made herself a dinner of fried eggs. That had been breakfast, and lunch, too. That was life for the time being: fried eggs.

Soon Mrs. J. would be stopping by with Larks. Flora had called her to say she’d be happy to take him now, after she’d awakened in the night several times badly needing to pee but too terrified to leave bed. Larks was no fearsome guard dog; he was a wet-nosed tail wagger. But he was alive, another creature, a witness.

In the country, in her father’s house newly hers, Flora felt aware of being alive to an uncomfortable degree. When people said something made them feel so alive, they seemed to mean it was a desirable state to find oneself in, a source of elation. But for Flora, feeling so conscious of her beingness was lonely, and a little gross. Being so alive was morbid; it was near death.

“I’m having a near-death experience,” she told her mother over the phone, and it was true; death was near all right—it was her housemate. She’d called from the kitchen phone to have a little company while she ate her eggs, but the short tether of the cord reached only as far as the counter, so she ate standing up.

As a child, she loved to play a simple word game with her mother. Her mother would say, “I’m me, and you’re you.” And then Flora would say, “No! I’m me, and you’re you.” Her mother: “Sorry, Flo. I’m me, and you’re you.” Flora: “Nooo! I’m me, and you’re you.” And so on, the game continuing indefinitely and hilariously, with no hope of resolution, Flora’s laughter increasingly hysterical. How could they both be right? Were they both me? Were they both you? Now it seemed more poignant than funny: a parent and child negotiating the murky territory between them—that border loosely patrolled, and regularly trespassed. In her father’s house, back in Darwin, who was who exactly?

“What are you going to do up there all by yourself?” her mother asked. “I still don’t understand this plan.”

“Plan,” Flora said. “That’s a nice word for it.”

“I thought so.”

“I’m going to have Larks. I won’t be all by myself.”

“In that case. What are you and the dog going to do up there all by yourselves?”

Rude questions. Also bewildering.

“Your friends are calling here daily, Flo. They’re trying to track you down. They say your cell phone isn’t working.”

Flora had imagined her father’s life in Darwin as romantic and solitary; she’d been right only on the romance. But now, if she wanted, she could live out that fantasy of romantic solitude. She hadn’t told friends in the city where to find her, because she didn’t know what to tell them. And she liked that no one knew where she was; she liked that her cell phone was no longer accepting messages. The comfort lay in the easy explanation she had for her mood: death, a justification; a death-justified hooky from the world. It reminded her of the first time she lied to her parents about where she was going, of running away from school—the complete liberation in letting others down. Still, she feared for herself the way she might fear for another person. Her life might not work out. It seemed more than a possibility.

“Everyone’s worried. They want to know how you are.”

“They want credit for calling,” Flora said. “They want their concern noted.”

“That’s a little low, isn’t it? You really don’t think your friends love you and want to know how you are?”

“I suppose both impulses could be in play.” Was that low, or was it true? Was she right, or just depressed? Her thoughts appeared clear, and lucid—she could see through everyone. But perhaps what she was seeing was her own foul mood reflected back like lights in a mirror. “What do you tell them?”

“I say you’re not quite up for talking, but that it means a lot to you that they’re checking in and that you’ll be in touch soon. You will be in touch soon, won’t you? Otherwise, maybe you could cut a small portion from your large inheritance for your poor old social secretary here in the city?”

“You’re shameless.”

“On the vulgar matter of coin, and the matter of your father, I suppose I am.”

“Have I lost my mind, is that what’s going on here?”

“You’re doing fine,” her mother said.

“You don’t sound quite convinced.”

“One day at a time, Flo—like the alcoholics.”

“I’m glad you brought that up—I’m seriously considering it, alcoholism. Seems a logical next step, doesn’t it? The New England way—stoical self-destruction.”

“Don’t go Protestant on me, Flora. That I can’t take. And don’t make me come up to Darwin and rescue you.”

“No, no. No interventions needed yet.” Mrs. J.’’ sedan glided into the pool of light that was the driveway. “I’ve got to go, Mom. The dog’s here.”

“Tell Mrs. J. hello from me. Tell her I still use that ironing-board cover she made me all those years ago.”

“But you don’t. As far as I know, you don’t even own an iron.”

“I most certainly do. You really are a revolting child. Who brought you up?”

“Good-bye, Mom.”

She watched through the kitchen window as Larks, released, bounded toward the door, his black-and-white body frantic, his excitement uncomfortable. He could not keep all four paws on the ground. He knew better than to bark—her father never stood for that—but he let out an almost squeal. It seemed cruel to open the door, to meet such anticipation with the disappointment that was herself. But Larks was happy to see her. She squatted down, the screen door against her back, and he burrowed his cool nose into her hair, her hand, her lap.

“Larks,” she said, holding his two plush ears in her hands like ponytails. “Hello, Larks.”

When she’d first met the new puppy, she’d asked her father, “Isn’t it pretentious to name your dog after a poet—and such a depressive one at that?” She’d told him, “He looks more like a Fred to me.”

“Are you kidding?” her father had said. “This dog has the soul of a poet. This dog understands the vicissitudes of the human condition.”

“Boy, is he happy to be home,” said Mrs. J. She sagged with shopping bags. Flora stood quickly to help and the dog ran into the house, tail wagging, in search.

“So good to see you,” Flora said, taking two bags and kissing Mrs. J. on the cheek. She smelled of breath mints. The plumpness of her skin was peach-soft. She was in her sixties, around the same age as Flora’s father, but had always seemed both younger and older than he—less worn, but of another generation. Only the hair around her temples had truly grayed, and her small roundness gave her an air of permanence, of invulnerability. “You haven’t aged in however many years since I saw you last,” Flora told her. “Really, Mrs. J., your DNA ought to be studied.”

“Almost two years now,” Mrs. J. said. “You look just the same, too, Flora. Just as you did as a little girl. Your dad always said that.”

“I’m not sure it’s a compliment at this point.”

“Oh, it’s a compliment. You’re still too young to know it, but it’s a compliment.”

Mrs. J., short for Jankowitz, had cleaned house for Flora’s family, or for her father, for two decades, since they first moved to Darwin. She’d been there, through it all, straightening up. They held the doors open for each other and dumped their bags by the fridge. Flora cleared her dinner dishes to the sink. It was suddenly embarrassing to be eating breakfast at night.

“What’s all this?” she asked of the bags.

“Some food for Larks. A few little things for you. I made beef stew. I remembered how much you loved my beef stew back when I used to babysit. Remember that? I put it in a few containers—you can freeze them. Have them as you like.”

Flora’s eyes stung; her throat stabbed. Kindness took its toll on the body. She nodded, and they silently loaded the containers into the freezer.

“And noodles. I got a few packages—it’s good with these egg noodles.”

Mrs. J. had bought three big bags of dog food, which she carried one by one over to the pantry closet. Larks had returned, expectant, and stood watching his food as it moved across the room.

“You’ve done too much,” Flora said.

Mrs. J. stopped and stared at her. “Please, Flora,” she said.

“He gets one scoop in the morning, and a scoop and half a can of wet food at night,” she went on. “Do you want me to write it down for you?”

“No, no,” Flora said, but she did anyway.

“I guess I should be getting back,” Mrs. J. said. “Told Mr. J. I’d be back in a flash. But I’ll be stopping by. To see you, Flora, and Larks.”

In all the years, Flora had never met Mr. J., though she’d seen pictures and knew he existed. The family theory had been that he’d struck upon some undeserved good luck when Mrs. J. agreed to have him, though Flora couldn’t now remember why.

Flora walked her outside. The sky was quilted with star cover. “You’re the best,” she said, and she bent to embrace this almost grandmother, this woman she’d once known so well.

“Flora—your father. He was so good to me. So good. They don’t make men like him anymore. I hate to say it, but they don’t.”

Flora tucked her hands into the sleeves of her sweatshirt and hugged her arms around herself.

“That girlfriend of his,” Mrs. J. continued. “That Cynthia. I have to tell you, I don’t care for her. From the beginning, I didn’t trust her. I didn’t like it when she was alone in the house. I felt she was after something, from him, from your dad. Can’t say what it was—his money, maybe, the house?”

“My dad seems an unlikely target for a gold digger,” Flora said. “A bronze digger, maybe.”

“I’m telling you, Flora, I don’t care for her at all.”

It was one thing for Flora to dislike her father’s girlfriend. But Mrs. J.? Was Cynthia actually unlikable? “I just met her, so it’s hard for me to say.”

“I know, I know. And I don’t like to trouble you with any more than what you’ve got on your plate already. But I thought you should know. Just keep your eyes open.”

“Okay,” Flora said. “Thanks.” She was suddenly exhausted. Leave me alone, she wanted to say, she almost said. Leave me.

“Like I said, I’ll be stopping by, checking in, seeing if you all need anything.”

“Thanks again, Mrs. J.,” Flora said. She felt she needed to say more. “It’s a comfort to know you’re nearby,” she added.

“I know it is, sweetie. I know.”

Back inside, Flora headed for the guest room. Her father’s television was nearly as old as she was, and if there had ever been a remote, it had long since vanished, so flipping the channels required standing by the box and stooping to press the tiny up or down button. Flora stooped; she pressed. America was obsessed with rejection. On one channel, there was a show where, one by one, girls were rejected from a career in modeling. In another show, each week a new family got the ax for not having quite a miserable-enough life—almost, but not quite. In a third show, young women were gradually and systematically rejected by a man they had just met who did not, it turned out, want to marry them.

Did Flora share in the national fervor? She had rejected her father, not visiting him in Darwin, and then not reading his manuscript of poems when first he gave it to her over breakfast at the diner—wandering the papers, instead, around the desert of her apartment, from bedside table to desk to drawer, simultaneously fussing and neglecting, handling them like a fetish she must be cured of. Even now, she rejected him by not wanting to read them, exiling them to the body bag, rejecting her role as his chosen reader, the one he trusted, his executioner. She’d rejected her mother, and her friends, and her work—everything she left behind in the city so hastily, as if she’d been waiting for the chance to leave them all along. And now she’d rejected Cynthia, whom she had just met, regardless of whether she could be trusted or not, by saying no, there was no room for her in the memorial service, or her father’s house, no room for her in life or death.

On the shows, the moment of rejection was stretched out to the most awkward extent possible and saved for the very last minute of programming, as though it were a reward held out to viewers for getting through all the optimism and pluck of the previous hour. The rejected one usually cried, his or her face crumpling into wrinkles of injury and despair, but so did the ones who had been narrowly spared from rejection for one more week—whether out of malice or relief, empathy, love, or fury, it was hard to tell.

Flora, watching, cried, too. She had a hard time not crying when she saw other people cry, as if her face were a mirror. Was that all she was? The thought was troubling. But then, it was a relief to cry, to in fact weep. To sit on the floor beneath the blue daze of the tele vision and weep. “Did you cry?” her father had once asked her after some insignificant childhood mishap, some bike or tree unfooting. “Did I cry? I weeped!” Flora had told him indignantly. It had become a family story. She did not cry; she weeped. She cried so hard, her mouth grew dry, her tongue hurt. She cried as she’d cried as a child, alone in her room at the President’s House, making ugly, desperate noises, her face hot and wet, the dog standing above her, slowly wagging his tail, watching her with interest, head atilt, waiting.

Later, sapped and waterlogged, she retreated to her little room with the cordless telephone and the phone book—her links to other human beings, but also, each in its own way, a reasonable weapon against the skull of an intruder, should the need arise. Her city cell phone, now permanently off, received spotty service in her father’s house anyway—service was spotty in Darwin in general, a metaphor for its disconnection from the larger world. If the would-be intruder thought to cut the phone lines, she’d have no way to call for help. She and Larks would be on their own.

What Flora needed was expert advice. Her fellow literary executioners and Plath and Joyce were of no practical use. Her father was not Plath or Joyce. But even when an early Plath poem had lately been discovered by some graduate student rousing long-slumbering manuscripts, it had birthed only limited curiosity. Flora knew because she’d read about the incident in the library. There was no such thing as a poem heard around the world. But still, her father had been a prominent scholar, of the Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler crowd—the triumvirate of pop poetry criticism, could there be said to be such a thing. It was not unthinkable that Lewis Dempsey’s poems could prompt limited attention, too, whether they were any good or not.

She needed to consult someone who knew things. Paul something—something Welsh, or Scottish—that was her father’s lawyer; he had drawn up the will. He’d put everything in order, officially documenting and organizing her father’s death. A former student was as much as she knew. A Darwin English major turned attorney. She opened the phone book to the business pages in the back. The last name started with a B, or a D. In the D’s she found “Davies, Paul, Esq.” It was nearly midnight, but she would just call the office while no one was there and leave a message, while she was thinking of it. But a man answered on the first ring.

“Oh,” she said. “I must have dialed the wrong number.”

She was about to hang up when she heard the man say, “Who are you trying to reach?”

“A lawyer. I’m sorry if I woke you. I thought I was calling an office. I was going to leave a message.”

“Is this an emergency?”

“No, no, I was just hoping to make an appointment. Please accept my apol—”

“You have called a lawyer. This is my office.”

“Who is this?” she asked.

“Who is this calling?”

Had she stumbled upon some pervert who now wanted to play late-night phone games with her? “Listen, I really am sorry to have disturbed you. I’m going to hang up.”

“This is one of the stranger phone calls I’ve ever received,” the man said. “Let’s start over. Hello, this is Paul Davies.”

“Really? That’s whom I was calling. I was assuming no one would be there, I was going to—”

“Yes, leave a message, but here I am. Who is this?”

“This is Flora Dempsey. My father—”

“Sure, Lew Dempsey. One of my favorite clients. One of my favorite teachers. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Was he? Thank you.” Almost no one called her father Lew—her mother, Ira Rubenstein. In the mouth of this stranger, it sounded overly intimate, intrusive, crass.

“A great guy—a legend in town.” He paused. “What can I do for you today, Ms. Dempsey?”

Today? Was it even, officially, one day or another? Was the lawyer always this preemptory? Was he working against a major deadline? Or had she caught him mid-tryst? “Flora, please,” she said. She was not prepared; she was in her pajamas. “Why don’t we make an appointment for another time. I’m just hoping to ask your advice on a few details of the will.”

“What sort of details?”

“Details maybe isn’t the right word. More overview, I guess.”

“All right, overview of what?”

“These things I’ve inherited—the house, the writing. Mostly the writing. I’m not sure what to do. But it’s late, and I feel I must be keeping you from something important.”

“It’s pretty straightforward. And you’ve caught me now. Why don’t I run through what I’d tell you if you came in for an appointment.”

“If it’s no trouble—”

“As literary executor, essentially you are a stand-in for your father vis-à-vis his work. So, in that capacity, you may be asked to sign contracts or grant permission, or you may choose to edit a piece of his writing in anticipation of publication. But the extent of your involvement is entirely up to you.” He paused, as though waiting for confirmation that she was following. She muttered in compliance. “It’s presumed by the designation that your interests will be in line with his—with what he would have wanted for the work.”

“Is it?”

“That’s the assumption, yes.”

Her interests primarily concerned not reading her father’s work. How would that have squared with his? Surely there were former students like this know-it-all on the line—worshipful, ambitious, and far more capable—her father might have appointed to the job. When had he first chosen her from among all the possible literary executors? When had he said, Flora, it must be Flora? Had he said anything to Paul Davies about why he wanted her? She wanted to stop him now and ask him. But Paul was still explaining—a barrage of legalese, and not what she wanted from him. She wanted him to tell her that her father had said how wonderful she was, how sensitive, how she was such a good reader, and a good daughter. She wanted him to say that her father had left behind detailed instructions enumerating his expectations. She wanted him to say she didn’t have to do anything, that there was a caveat in the will, or a mistake. She wanted him to say that as it turned out, her father wasn’t dead after all. She watched the hands of the clock on the bedside table meet as though in prayer, pointing at the ceiling.

“The biggest hassles for a literary executor usually occur when there is a separate heir—the heir’s and the executor’s interests may be at odds, financially speaking,” he was saying. “But since you’re both executor and heir, your situation is relatively simple.”

Was that supposed to be reassuring? He’d said it so cheerfully. Executor and heir. Both. Her new, symbiotic, bipolar identity. Why had she admitted ignorance to the lawyer? Why had she even bothered asking? She was old enough to know not to make phone calls in her dead father’s house in the middle of the night.

“It’s like the estate,” he blazed on, an assault of information and analogy. “You’re in charge of the house now, and in that capacity you can choose to remodel or leave it sitting empty, or you can put it on the market to sell. As I said, it’s entirely up to you.”

Was he patronizing her? Would he have said the same, with such perfunctory pep, to Ted Hughes had he called for a consultation on Sylvia’s poems? “It’s that easy?” she asked him.

“Legally speaking, yes.”

Legally speaking, financially speaking. She knew his type. She could easily picture this man—he sounded young and undeservingly self-confident—a bully in his khakis, his white monogrammed pressed shirt now untucked as the single concession to the hour. Everything was neat to guys like him, the perfect soul-killing jargon holstered and at the ready. Life a series of logical legalities, spread out before him like an illuminated path to heaven. A man who comforted himself with his old, annotated paperbacks of Beat poets, who at cocktail parties with other lawyers talked about how Naked Lunch had changed his life. Had her father really trusted this man with his will, with his death? Will—it was a funny word. This is my will. I will it to be so.

Now all she had to do, according to this legal expert, was guess the most private hopes her father might have had vis-à-vis a stack of poems he wrote in the last year of his life without ever showing or telling anyone other than her. The relatively simple task before her a mere matter of deciding whether they were ready for publication, and, if not, how to make them so. And then, of course, there was the correspondence, the early drafts, the speeches from his presidency, the essays from his forty-year career, the whole of his life in letters, now, impossibly, hers. Executor and heir. She had it all.

“Ms. Dempsey, are you still there?”

She was, but she didn’t want to be. So she did something she hadn’t done since high school, in a fight with her boyfriend or her mother, the abruptness as satisfying as the sharp smash of a slammed door: She hung up.

They were always in different rooms: Flora’s father reading the paper in his study, her mother reading Laura Ingalls Wilder to her downstairs in the library; him falling asleep in front of some game on the television in their bedroom, her smoking her Marlboro reds in front of a murder mystery on the other television on the third floor. The excesses of the President’s House welcomed such separations. Her parents were the sun and the moon, only rarely inhabiting the same sky, and when it happened, the feeling eclipse-like—exhilarating, and unnerving. But he could make her laugh the way no one else could, the way Flora never could. Flora’s grandmother had told her mother, “Marry the man who makes you laugh—they all make you cry,” and she had taken the advice literally.

Her job now was to be the wife of the president of Darwin, and even Flora could see that she had decided not to do it well. She was certainly determined not to look the part. Her hair turned an alarming shade of purple overnight, and it was discovered she’d experimented with Manic Panic, a company whose target customer attended junior high school. She bought a pair of black combat boots and wore them around town unlaced. To complete the adolescent goth look, it could only be assumed, she, who never wore eye makeup, had her eyelashes dyed black. Her new eyes made her look depressed. And she left them every Tuesday night, Flora and her father, to return to the city and flee Darwin, back to her old life, the life she had never wanted to leave in the first place and still refused to give up, to see her friends and her analyst.

“Doesn’t everyone’s mother have an analyst?” Flora asked Georgia.

Georgia, who loved to be consulted on all matters of human behavior, paused to consider before answering. “Many do, but not all” was her assessment.

Abandoned, Flora and her father developed a Tuesday-night routine of their own. Dinner at Ponzu, a Japanese restaurant on an ugly commercial strip just out of town, with huge grills on the tables where the chefs cooked in front of you and did tricks like flipping a shrimp in the air and catching it in their pockets. They were beloved guests because they came every week and because her father tipped exorbitantly. The hostess insisted on bringing them, on the house, a soda for Flora, and for her father, plum wine, which he found cloyingly sweet but drank out of politeness. He was a man who cleaned his plate, even if he didn’t like something, and this annoyed Flora’s mother, who felt his manners missed the point. “I’d rather have you leave some food and listen to me when I talk to you instead,” she’d say, as if one had a choice about that kind of thing.

Sometimes Georgia came with them to dinner. Flora’s father called Georgia “the Wizard,” for Georgia’s love of science and magic, and because the tops of her ears came to the gentlest of points. “It’s the Wild Wizard!” he’d say to her in greeting, and they would both look delighted.

“Like sisters,” the staff at Ponzu said.

Over dinner, there were competitions. “Let the competitions commence” was her father’s rallying cry. “Who can make the best cow sound?” And the three of them mooed, one at a time, her father announcing, “I won that one,” and they would shriek with laughter at the corruption of the judging system. “I’m sorr-ry,” he’d say, exaggerating the word to show he wasn’t a bit sorry. “Even the Lithuanian judge gave mine a nine-point-eight. You two squeaked by with an eight-point-two.”

Back at the house, her father made Flora sweet, milky tea, and then he would read to her, picking up wherever her mother had left off the night before. Flora would offer a synopsis of what he’d missed, but he never seemed to mind that these weekly sessions meant he only ever heard one-seventh of a story. One month he started to read to her from a different book, a book of his choosing, one he had loved growing up and bought for her in town at Finch’s Books: Swallows and Amazons. But Flora had found it boring and they’d quit halfway through. It was years later, remembering her father’s hopefulness upon presenting her with the hardbound volume with a simple line drawing of a canoe or some other member of the boat family across its cover, that it occurred to her that in rejecting the story, she might have hurt his feelings—learning she had the power to wound her parents a long, slow lesson for her.

Just before nine o’clock, her father always found a stopping place and closed the book, and the two of them went upstairs and turned on the television. Together, they watched a show her mother would never have watched, where things blew up and people jumped out of planes and punched one another. It was terrible, a fact both Flora and her father freely acknowledged, but they loved it. The show was funny, both intentionally and unintentionally, and they shouted at the television as they watched.

“Not everyone can appreciate the subtle genius of this show,” he told her. “But you and I, we’ve grasped the secret of its stealthy power, haven’t we?”

And Flora loved the exclusivity of it all—of the show and Ponzu, that they were hers and her father’s and only sometimes Georgia’s. There was no need to share with others. Tuesdays were theirs, and no one else’s.

Before bed, Flora’s mother called to check in. Her voice from the city sounded different, lighter. It was her old voice, temporarily restored, though often she sounded tired from her drive, or all the analyzing, and Flora, wide-awake, tried to make her voice sound tired, too. But Flora wasn’t much for talking on the phone, and after a few minutes she would pass it off to her father and brush her teeth and get ready for bed while her parents talked. When her father hung up, she could see the pull of work and other matters on his face—he, who had been hers all night, no longer hers. He tucked her in quickly, rushing a little, pulling the blankets up around her ears and telling her she was “the best of all possible Flos,” and then he turned out the light and went next door, into his study, and she listened for the sounds of his worries—papers whispering against one another, books slipping away from the shelf, the sigh of leather as he adjusted himself in his chair.

It was then, staring at the light from his study as it sneaked beneath her door, that Flora began to miss her mother, her stomach suddenly a little queasy. She lay on her side, and the sound of her own heartbeat in her ear worried her, and she played the game she played when she couldn’t sleep, trying to scare herself to sleep. There was a witch walking up the long, formal staircase, moving slowly, step by step, each heartbeat another step. Now she was at the last step Flora and Georgia could jump off of; now she was on the landing; now she was admiring the chandelier. Flora had to be asleep by the time the witch got to the doorway of her room, or else. On other nights, her parents inhabited their separate spheres throughout the house, but they were both there. Flora could find them if she needed to; she knew where they were, the world less precarious, quieter.

Still other nights, they both were gone. Her father traveled for work—he was out wooing fat cats, a funny image—and would bring her T-shirts from the cities he visited: CLEVELAND—YOU’VE GOTTA BE TOUGH; ITHACA IS GORGES. Flora treasured them, as if they were thoughtful gifts. Sometimes her mother went along. Once, they were invited to the president’s house in Washington, D.C. They both had voted against the president, but it was only Joan who wondered if she could bear to sit in the same room with him. She bought a floor-length shimmering blue dress that made her blue-gray eyes shine like icy water. She had never looked more beautiful, though she complained it had been a mistake, it wasn’t her, she felt like an imposter.

“Maybe it’s okay if it’s not you,” Flora said. “That way you can pretend you’re someone else when you have to meet the president. Someone who likes him more.”

“I’m getting tired of being someone else,” her mother said.

Mrs. J. came and stayed with Flora and made her beef stew and they played gin rummy on the red Formica of the kitchen counter and drank soda, and Flora didn’t miss her parents at all. Mrs. J. told her stories. The previous president of Darwin had killed himself. Not in the house, but after. He’d been a good man, Mrs. J. said, but he’d had a hard time of it.

“Some people are too good for this world,” she said—a chastening dictum that seemed to rewrite the universe, and Flora’s place in it.

Her parents had probably not told Flora this on purpose. It would be a story she would cling to, or one that clung to her. A story she knew without them knowing, that she knew in spite of them. Some people were too good for this world, and some people weren’t.

A few weeks after the trip, a photograph arrived in the mail. It was of Joan Dempsey shaking hands with the president in the receiving line, signed to her across the bottom, “With kind regards,” from him.

“What am I supposed to do with this? Frame it and hang it on my wall?”

“I’ll keep it,” Flora said.

But instead, her mother signed it, too, across the top, “With kind regards, Joan Dempsey,” and she mailed it right back to the White House.

It was embarrassing, like when her mother made a scene in a restaurant about the food not being warm or the plates arriving at different times. But it was also exciting. It was exciting when people misbehaved. Flora’s father, though, wasn’t excited.

“What an infantile thing to do,” he accused. “Was it really necessary?”

“When did you become such a coward?” her mother said, her voice as icy as her eyes.