Chapter Five

Despite Flora’s initial impetus to help disadvantaged children, it turned out that social work meant working with adults in equal measure. She was better with children, who certainly could be opaque, stubborn, and infuriating, but they only knew how to be honest, whereas adults were self-deluded and wily. Not always, but too often, and over time it made Flora cynical. She had been naïve and shocked by the self-interest she saw in parents, people whose own egos were so dinged up that they couldn’t see through to putting their children’s interests first. She was impatient with their seeming lack of will to change their behavior, not to mention their utter lack of common sense. To help the children, she had to help their parents, and that wasn’t what she had bargained for at the outset.

She had been idealistic, and even though she heard all her professors explain the family systems theories, she didn’t really understand what it meant in practice. Somehow she glossed over the reality of what her future job would require of her and saw only tender and satisfying vignettes of changing a child’s life for the better. Despite her ambivalence, she worked at the hospital as a social worker for thirty years, doing the best she could, which she knew was nowhere near good enough. Her patients liked her and thanked her profusely for the most part, but Flora figured that was because they didn’t know any better. They were just grateful for someone to listen to them for a bit and maybe point them in the direction of some service or program they had no idea existed. But Flora felt like she failed everyone, from the parents to their unfortunate children to her supervisors and her colleagues. She had made a poor choice, and she was unwilling or unable to conform to it. And increasingly, she was unable to pretend otherwise.

She knew it was noble and important work, and she did care for the patients she had dealt with, but in addition to her feelings of inadequacy, the visual, visceral neediness became in her mind something much more monstrous than reality. Lethargically pulling on her pantyhose and bra each morning, walking around the house in a state of half dress, putting off pulling on the white uniform that signaled the inevitable cold plunge into the outside world, she envisioned the hallways of the hospital lined with patients, mostly women, mostly poor, stretching their arms out toward her and moaning, “Help me! Please!” Her patients had once again aggregated into a monolithic they, and she struggled to differentiate the individuals and their disparate needs. The very flip side of the impetus that led her to the profession—wanting to make life easier for helpless, already damaged children—was pushing her away. She felt a deep shame when thinking about turning her back on them and for the feelings of resentment she felt toward them, which were undeserved, but whenever she saw years of the same work ahead, she had the urge to cover her ears and shake her head, as if to drown out those voices lining the hallway.

While she couldn’t pinpoint the first patient decades ago that had ushered in her period of professional settling in, she clearly remembered the one who alerted her to signs of its looming expiration date. Margie Coughlin. The young woman provoked simultaneous conflicting emotions that were inevitably rendered into anger and impatience. Margie was twenty-two and had a four-year-old son and an eighteen-month-old daughter, thin dark brown hair clawed into a lumpy ponytail, perpetually smudged and askew eyeglasses with pearly pink frames, and no social support whatsoever. The boyfriend who had fathered both children was in prison for a variety of criminal transgressions. Her adoptive and abusive parents had cast Margie out at age seventeen and refused to speak to her when Margie’s pregnancy became apparent. She lived in subsidized housing. She wore only one facial expression, which expressed nothing, and her tone was flat. If someone saw Margie walking alone on the street, they would think nothing of her, or at the very most they might note the existence of a quiet, unperturbed, dull girl. But she would never be alone on the street now. She was always with a stroller and a toddler, joylessly pushing and yanking.

At their first meeting, when Margie trundled the children to the hospital for the first time, Flora could see the list of services in her mind that she would set up for Margie. Typical case, Flora assumed, and she felt wise and skilled, a flash of professional pride and ambition. But within ten minutes, Margie’s affectless demeanor and listless, robotic responses sucked away Flora’s energy so that rather than lean into the problems at hand, she could literally feel herself pulling back in her chair, imagining dropping her pen from a superfluous height onto the legal notepad as if signaling retreat. As Margie continued to talk in a monotone in answer to Flora’s last question—what had she asked her?—Flora forced herself to snap to it, pushing through the murk to find a way to this young woman. Margie was suffering. And her poor children. What hope did they have? Margie persisted in Flora’s caseload for eight months before she abruptly disappeared—telephone disconnected, door unanswered on four separate visits. Flora wished she felt more concern than relief, but it wasn’t the case.

In the late spring of 1970, Flora accompanied Will to New Orleans where he was invited to join a psychiatry conference panel. Though Flora rarely said aloud what she was thinking, the humidity sapped her energy and relaxed her to the point where she didn’t overthink telling Will what she was stewing over. She didn’t so much as decide to confess to Will that she was thinking of quitting her job at the hospital, as much as the words simply slid out. Her true feelings, however, were too appalling to utter, so she presented it as more of a principled gesture than a reluctant, weak, misanthropic one. She almost convinced herself that these were the real reasons: she just wasn’t driven enough; she believed that to do good work in the profession she should be more invested in her work; she didn’t measure up, enthusiasm-wise, to her colleagues, and finally—she was especially pleased with this one—it was better for her to step away and make a spot available to a young, eager woman like the types who often worked for Will, those who were on their way somewhere and who could effectively make a difference and feel some satisfaction from it.

She expected him to counter her and present a superficial pep talk, assuming that she was merely complaining due to a bout of requisite burnout. But he surprised her by receiving the information as if he had been waiting for her to deliver just this very report.

“Why put yourself through it then, dear? You don’t need to work. You can retire. It’s not unheard of,” he said. She hadn’t even considered categorizing it as retirement, and the word jarred her. She knew that people did retire in their fifties, but they were stockbrokers who lived off interest earnings and who luxuriated on yachts in the Caribbean. She had been working—babysitting, cleaning houses, and summers filing in her father’s office—since she was fourteen years old, as had her sisters. Growing up in the industrious, service-oriented home of Frank and Delia Devereaux allowed no other option. Even though they did not need to work either, financially speaking, the idea of not doing so, at least for Flora, felt akin to inviting the devil over for tea. Lillian and Ruth, on the other hand, were able to make the transition from nominal part-time work to housewifery and gadding with only minimal hand-wringing. And if she was as skilled as everyone seemed to think she was, then she was shamefully wasting a talent. What purpose would she serve without her work?

Will was drinking an Old Fashioned and the backdrop of the royal blue clapboard behind him on the verandah made him look like a kindly, avuncular talk show host.

“You don’t need to work,” he repeated, now losing focus as he scanned the menu. “You know that, of course. You can do whatever you like. You can …”

The waiter had interrupted them then and, after ordering their meals, which took far too long given Will’s unnecessary and performative comments about every special, he immediately began describing the intolerable speaking style of one of his fellow conference panelists from that afternoon’s session. Flora appeared to listen and laugh at his impersonations, but in her mind, she was trying to fill out the rest of the sentence he had deserted.

The idea of leaving her job initially thrilled her, but now that the decision had been made and the pertinent people informed, and now that she allowed herself to imagine the ecstasy of letting all of the psychic weight, responsibility, and general unpleasantness miraculously disappear, she felt something akin to vertigo and saw herself falling off a cliff, her arms spread wide like an eagle’s wings—the freedom of flight, replaced instantly with the terror of death. What would catch her? Where would the borders be that held her in place and that maintained the day as a recognizable unit of time? Was the job actually essential to keeping her connected to the human world? Is that what jobs were for people, insufferable parts of the day that allowed you to enjoy the other parts based on their temporary absence? It didn’t seem to be at all what Will felt about his job. Work rendered him triumphant. Besides the nurses and other social workers at the hospital and the girls who worked for Will, she didn’t know many other women who had jobs, so she didn’t have a clear idea if she and Will represented two extremes or if they were two random points in a scatter plot.

Most of the women she knew spent their days ricocheting between social situations because it was what they purportedly enjoyed. Adding to her complicated feelings was the vague awareness that she was giving up something that other women would love to have if only their husbands could relinquish the idea that a working wife undermined their manly status. These friends and acquaintances had the time to clean their own homes, but they, like Flora, still hired someone to do it. The idea that she would have lunch—or worse, “luncheon”—with anyone in the middle of a weekday did not hold the same appeal it seemed to for other women. Ruth took part in this ritual at least twice a week. Besides Ruth or Lillian, Flora couldn’t even cast a woman in the role of desirable lunch date for herself. Spending time with her sisters was effortless and didn’t sap her energy. Most people, through little fault of their own, required labor. There are people she could imagine ringing her up and inviting her, women she liked well enough and some who had been longtime friends—Grace, Hazel, and Esther came to mind—but, she knew that the plans, the instant they were set, would mutate into obligations and she could already feel excuses mounting in her arsenal. Her needs were impossible to reconcile. She longed for unobstructed time, empty pages in her calendar, with the exception of an occasional appointment for Toto’s grooming. She even let her own salon and medical appointments lapse because of unwelcome entries in her calendar and the attendant tedious and taxing chitchat. But she was, simultaneously, wary of a vast sea of time and felt compelled to control it.

She could theoretically enjoy herself, go for walks in the city’s parks or nature preserves, and though she was a member of the botanical garden, she did not enjoy walking for long periods and preferred admiring nature out of windows or from comfortable lawn chairs. She had always been averse to getting dirty or wet as a girl, unlike Lillian who was brave and adventurous, and Ruth who was afraid of everything and just never complained. Prissy, her mother had called her. Will preferred “uptight.” She did, however, find the notion of going to the movies, even in the middle of a sunny Wednesday or Monday, to be romantic, self-indulgent, escapist. It seemed itself a cinematic thing to do. She could picture herself walking past the theater and, upon seeing what was playing, suddenly decide then and there to buy a ticket without consulting or compromising with a soul. She would be free, at least until cocktail hour.

When Abby was a baby, Flora left her job at the hospital and stayed home. There was no problem with finding ways to fill her time then. She felt busy every waking moment, and the days were comfortably indistinguishable from one another. Caring for Abby was a wholly immersive and pleasurable experience. When other new mothers complained about this or that, Flora nodded along empathetically, but her implicit commiseration was affected. She didn’t mind any of it. She felt like she was born for this task and she looked forward to having more. At least she felt this way until the baby took her first steps. It was as if a kitchen timer had gone off then, jangling crudely and disrupting her dreamy maternal idyll. From that day forward, all of the inconveniences and sacrifices announced themselves and suddenly grated on her—waking up at odd hours, the constant vigilance required by a self-motored infant with a tender cranium, the weight she couldn’t shed. All the other mothers were settling into their roles and seeming to enjoy their duties more whereas Flora was going in the opposite direction. She began to long for the futile ritual of her work. By the time Abby turned eighteen months old, she—and, instrumentally, Will—had finagled to get her back into her former job at the hospital as a part-time social worker. Abby’s tender skull would be looked after, two days a week, by one of Will’s former students, until she went to nursery school at which time Flora returned to full-time work where she remained until she was fifty years old.

But leaving her job the second time around, even after the immediate honeymoon period, did not appear to result in any remarkably deleterious effects. Will’s continuing to see patients at the hospital and bringing it up in his post-work soliloquy at least once a week did not help Flora to relegate the place to her past, but aside from such perennial reminders of her shame-inducing deed, Flora adjusted to her new lifestyle with relative ease. Her appointment calendar featured just the right amount of white space, festooned with the occasional personal and car health maintenance appointments, and after a few months of dithering about the venture, the piano students she had taken on.

Their piano, the one that greeted visitors upon entering their home and that likely sent the deceptive message that musical people lived within, was Flora’s childhood piano, on which she and her sisters had obligatorily taken lessons throughout their school-age years. It ended up in Flora’s house after her parents had both died and the house on Hilgard St. was sold. Having learned the basics at such a young age, Flora could read music but she no longer derived much pleasure from the instrument. Her fingers still knew how to play Bach’s Prelude in B Major and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the latter up to a certain measure beyond which she couldn’t recall the notes and which caused her to close the cover over the keys with a loud and exaggerated finality. It assuaged her apprehension about having the pointless object in their home—a clear example in her mind of an intolerable disequilibrium—once she started to use it to give lessons. And it allowed her to return to working with children, as nominal as the time and work was. It helped that Bea enjoyed playing it, too, though her repetition of Chopsticks became tiresome and Flora worried that Will would protest if it went on too long.

Four years on—a quantity so inconceivable that she counted on her fingers to confirm, imperceptibly flexing each at the knuckle—the lifestyle had simply become her life, and the end of spring and all of summer stretched before her, anchored by two appointments in her calendar: Bea’s first communion in early May, and Dr. Pavlik, her gynecologist, all the way in mid-August. Her piano students thinned out in the summer, many of them off to camp or family vacations. She and Will had no trips planned, though that could always change. The last big one did them for a while, they agreed, at least for international travel. Just over a year ago, they had met Lillian and Arthur in Stockholm and spent ten days touring the fjords and villages of Sweden and Norway. If she were the type to believe in such things, Flora would readily embrace the idea that she had been Scandinavian in a former life. The scenery, the food, the climate—she seemed to vibrate in sync with her surroundings. She also cherished being with Lillian who had been living in Paris on and off for her entire adult life. Their time together was tinged with remorse, however, given that Ruth could never be with them. Ruth’s fear of flying, the centerpiece of a cluster of phobias, was intractable, and it pained them that their youngest sister could never experience the city that both Lillian and Flora loved more than any other. To break up the summer a bit, Flora did hope that Will might suddenly have a conference to attend or a desire to visit Minneapolis or Charleston or some site he got an itch to see for himself while reading a historical biography, as they did two summers prior when they went to visit the Montpelier estate on a whim, only three days after Will got a bee in his bonnet about James Madison.

As for her piano students, she would find out soon enough who would still be wanting their lessons to continue through the summer, and she was beginning to see a pattern wherein new students would appear shortly after school ended, presumably when parents quickly tired of their children underfoot. To Flora’s relief, Elise Spencer always went to camp for July and most of August.

Elise was Flora’s least favorite student. She wore too much makeup for a fourteen-year-old, and while she certainly couldn’t help it, her figure was too mature for her age. In contrast to her curvy shape, her personality was as flat as a board. She didn’t seem to have any interest in playing the piano or doing anything else and dully looked at her fingernails instead of the keyboard whenever Flora was demonstrating a sequence or technique. There was little Flora was willing to do to trap her focus, and so the entire lesson felt twice its length. When Elise’s mother asked Flora how her daughter was progressing, Flora was uncharacteristically blunt: “She doesn’t seem interested and doesn’t pay much attention. I don’t see any real progress from week to week.” Flora hoped this negative assessment would end their relationship, owing to the parent chastising the child for ingratitude and insolence, but Judy Spencer merely adopted a look of mild pain each time Flora delivered her report. “Oh, Elise is so easily distracted. I’ll talk to her,” she’d say. Judy may have spoken to her daughter about it, but in the year she had been teaching her, nothing ever changed.

Elise was one of the few students who came to Flora’s house rather than Flora traveling to hers. Flora offered both options but most preferred to have Flora visit. It meant that a parent had one less driving errand they had to do in their day, and they could busy themselves around the house while Flora and the child sat wherever in the house the piano resided. The Spencers didn’t have a piano, so of course Elise never practiced. Flora didn’t see how Judy and her husband thought it practical to give their daughter piano lessons when they didn’t have any means for her to learn other than forty-five minutes a week. When she nonchalantly mentioned this to Will after she took Elise on, simply by way of making conversation and filling him in on her day, she was met with criticism.

“You have a contract, do you not?”

Flora did not.

“You cannot be accepting students who from the outset have no intention of keeping up their end of the bargain. It’s simply bad business.”

Flora had not nor would she ever consider anything as formal or cold as a contract. She didn’t have calling cards either. She had found her students through word of mouth and had generated a roster of six to ten students at any given time—and managed easy relationships with them. Flora issued her fee, which was always easily accepted, and the parties verbally agreed on the time and location. In the three years that she had been teaching, there was never a problem. Certainly students would quit, sometimes after a month or two, but Flora never took it personally. She knew how children—and their parents—were. Their “end of the bargain” was their business, and Flora didn’t mind one way or another if the students continued. She enjoyed most of them and their time together for as long as they cared to submit. And anyway, it had been Will’s initial idea for Flora to begin teaching piano if she was feeling the need to quell her Protestant work ethic, and she recalled no accompanying suggestions about establishing herself as a businessperson. It was so little money coming in, nothing that the IRS would ever concern itself with. Now this business about a contract. She appeared to coolly ignore his comment, but she imagined him saying, “I was only joking, dear. I have utter faith that you are capable of handling your professional life in the manner that suits you best. Of course you don’t need a contract.” However, she didn’t want an endorsement of her methods. She wanted to be trusted and left alone. Imagine her critiquing anything related to his practice! It was as preposterous as Edith telling Archie to get his own damn beer.

“If you enjoy being taken advantage of,” said Will in actuality, “there is a plethora of opportunities out there for you.” He was not looking at her as he spoke but rather rifling impatiently through the three-day-old Sunday paper and smudging newsprint on the white Formica kitchen tabletop. “Where is the book review section?”

Each time Elise came for her lesson, Flora sensed the residue of that conversation. She worried each time that Will would come home just as Judy Spencer had come to collect Elise, and he would condemn her for continuing her function as a doormat until it struck her that he had no idea what Elise or her mother looked like, nor would he think of asking who the departing student was. Relieved to see Will dropping the now one-sided conversation, Flora wordlessly slipped a plastic placemat underneath the newspaper while he continued his search.

“Eureka!” He took the section, a Manhattan and a bowl of pretzels off to the living room. A second balm of relief passed over Flora when he left the room.

Judy Spencer had pulled out of the driveway with Elise just moments before Will arrived home on this Wednesday, in fact, a year after that conversation, and she remembered it again. This time it lingered. Instead of setting about getting her own cocktail or preparing dinner, she went upstairs to sit in the bedroom, shoes finally off, her feet propped on a stack of pillows. She held her book as a prop, though all she had the intention to do was to stare out the window and let her thoughts settle. Of course, Will had never followed up to ask about her terminating the ill-fated relationship with Elise and her parents, but she rebutted his assumption in her mind now anyway. She didn’t feel at all taken advantage of. In fact, she felt somewhat guilty in the reverse direction. Elise tested the limits of her compassion and commitment. The girl was wasting her parents’ money and the time it took Judy—for whom some compassion surfaced—to drive the three miles to and from Flora’s house from the neighboring town each week. Judy probably made use of the hour to go to the supermarket or to smoke a cigarette in peace in her car, parked in the lot of Oakdale Plaza. Maybe it was the only time in the week that she could be alone, and she kept Elise taking lessons for her—Judy’s—sake alone. If that was the case, Flora supported it completely. She wished she could ask Judy if that was true. Or maybe it was something as pragmatic as Elise’s parents ensuring one legitimate extracurricular activity on the girl’s eventual college application. She wished she had the kind of husband to whom she could muse and speculate about such matters without receiving a lengthy, unsolicited female diagnosis.

When Flora had had enough of Elise’s sulking on this particular Wednesday, she offered her the option of going with her and Toto out for a piddle while they waited for Elise’s mother to come and retrieve her. It was a relief for both of them to stand up and step away from the piano.

“Can I hold him?” Elise asked when Flora picked up the dog to carry him outside.

Flora handed Toto over and watched a smile spread over the face where she had yet to witness anything but a pout. A smile is all the makeup this girl needs, and so much quicker to apply, thought Flora.

“Do you have any pets?” Flora asked her.

“No,” said Elise, kissing the top of Toto’s head where a small pink ribbon tied the long hair away from his eyes. “My mom is allergic to cats and my dad hates everything.”

Flora felt a sudden, sharp urge to cry. She could instantly see an ugly domestic tableau at the Spencer home and her dislike of Elise vanished, replaced by overwhelming sorrow. A reserve of empathy that she believed to have run dry seemed to fill her nasal passages and tear ducts, like a dam had been opened. She realized that she missed this sweet, painful feeling that had been activated by her patients, at least sometimes. Its rapid return—like the memory of Bach in her fingertips—was a familiar, integral part of her. She couldn’t relate to the exact situation—not that she really knew what it was—in Elise’s young life, or in her mother’s, but remembering that everyone suffers in their own way paradoxically made her feel better. It was that notion that extracted the bittersweet. She felt more balanced and allied with Elise, with everything, for a few moments.

Judy Spencer’s sky-blue Vega turned into the driveway and Flora could see the surprise register on her face followed by a quick decision to form a smile when she saw Flora and her daughter standing outside the front door. Flora said quietly to Elise, who was still holding Toto, “One day, before too long, you’ll be able to have your own pet.” Flora longed to accompany Elise to the car, sit in the front seat next to Judy, share a cigarette—Flora had never held even one to her lips—and have a heart-to-heart. She could learn about Judy’s dissatisfactions with her life, what she still had hope for, what she did to get through the gray days. Women were a mystery, but they didn’t have to be.

Even though Flora and her students had no “contract,” Flora felt an unspoken obligation to preserve a professional distance between herself and the parents of her students. It was already an awkward situation to be entering their homes or allowing their children into hers, and she didn’t want to barge in by asking them what they or their husbands did for a living, were they even still married, how many other children did they have, did they get along well with their spouses and children, did they look forward to them coming home?

When Flora met the parents—in every case but one so far it was the mother—she asked them things she already knew, routine questions like what grade the child was in, how long the child had been playing if at all, and if the parents played piano or any other musical instruments. The last question was intended to soften the procedural inquiry a bit—perhaps she was more businesslike than she was aware—but also to see if it might provoke the revelation of anything more personal. She got clues as soon as she entered their homes, of course, and as the child dutifully played, Flora would let her eyes wander as far as they could around her immediate field of vision without obviously turning her head to survey the room. There were always photos on the piano, and Flora had time to discern family likenesses and pointless guesses as to who was who. Sometimes these photos would answer some of her questions—a family portrait with three children, for instance. But she also noticed the choice of items to display on the piano and the state of them—a faded dried flower arrangement in a dusty vase, a cloisonné box, a Little League trophy, a box of Kleenex. She found herself analyzing, as Will would, based on these objects—it was hopeless to try not to.

As much as Flora dreaded Elise’s lesson day, she relished visiting Sam Goldman every Friday afternoon, and he always continued through the summer. Flora suspected that Hannah Goldman chose Friday to have the boy out of the way while she prepared Shabbat dinner. The solidity and warmth of the Goldman’s home—every inch of wall space covered unsystematically and lavishly with artwork, their Jewish faith observable in every other artifact, the smell of home-cooked food—all contrasted starkly with her own home, but she felt more tranquil, more welcome, in theirs. She had to be out well before sundown, and she met Sam as soon as he got home from school at 3:30 p.m. He was a tiny, dark-haired, pale-skinned ten-year-old vibrating with exuberance and unwitting charm. He couldn’t wait to play for Flora, to show her how he had mastered last week’s piece—Schumann’s Little Étude, for instance—and would stand from the bench afterwards and take a dramatic bow. The Goldman’s piano was a baby grand and therefore offered no surface to easily spy upon while he played, but in his case, she didn’t need any distraction. Sam played with his whole body and it was a fully engrossing experience to watch his head dip and sway and his arms come off the keys four times higher than necessary before hitting the keys with impressively accurate weight. His rear end came off the seat, too. None of these gestures seemed calculated for dramatic purposes but were rather the organic result of his joy in the sounds he was making. She didn’t need photos to know how much this boy was loved at home, though she worried about his school life. Sam never let Flora leave without showing her something he had made or something he had learned that week. Often these were avian-related artifacts, as he was a budding, likely bullied, ornithologist.

It had occurred to Flora, after the initial doubt-inducing effects of Will’s clinical business tips, that her music teacher transaction was not unlike his in the psychiatrist’s office. Both held sessions just under an hour, both shrouded in confidentiality, though hers was self-imposed, not contractual. Both involved physical proximity to their subject. The difference was that her population was children. With the intermittent exception of Elise, Flora was fond of her students. But there was another similarity, the inability to avoid patients or students they didn’t like. Will confessed to this regularly, but insisted that it was important to allow such challenges into the dynamic, to address one’s own shortcomings and tender spots—something she was not sure Will actually practiced in his work or his non-work life. This lecture involved the usual trotting out of transference and countertransference, concepts that always put Flora in mind of a ping-pong match. While her dynamic with her students did not carry anywhere near the weight and responsibility of that between Will and his patients, she took his words to heart and tried to not only tolerate Elise but think of their dealings as a self-improvement exercise. After more than a year of this, the only benefit was one of Kevin’s favored adages, that what didn’t kill her made her stronger. This comparison of their jobs was an observation that, in theory, would be interesting to share with Will. But she didn’t share it with him or with anyone else. It stayed somewhere with the other calcified ideas and impressions she amassed, in a hypothetical corner of her mind.

Occasionally an adult would ask Flora if she would give them lessons, sometimes a parent of one of her students or a friend of a friend. There was no reason she couldn’t teach a novice adult, but she rejected the idea. She was more comfortable with children, felt safer and freer and more talkative with them, and more open to her warmer side, just as she had with her social work patients. She had to come up with a reason, and while she was momentarily tempted to turn to Will and his professed business acumen for what she hoped might be a terse but professional response to which she could add her own tempering facial expressions and gestures, she thought better of it. “No, I’m sorry, I only teach children.” And she offered the names of one or two other teachers she knew who might take them on. It was accepted each time. Small victories.

The children to whom she taught piano could not be further away from those she had worked with at the hospital. These Sams and Elises and the math savant, Michael Lawrence, had every advantage available to them with extra to spare. There was not a moment that Flora was not aware of this, letting it rub on that well-worn spot of self-flagellation. But she could not deny the fact that she was much more likely to enjoy her mornings—and afternoons, and even evenings—now that she didn’t have to face a caseload. She still wore pantyhose every day—sometimes knee highs if she were wearing slacks—but she donned them with a bit more zest. She increased the amount of money they donated to Save the Children every year in an unabashed concession to her guilt about leaving the needy ones she had left behind. But all children are needy in some way, Flora reasoned. Everyone is.

Whenever Flora took on a new student, it was like having a new burst of color in her garden, a child whose quirks or weaknesses or impressive talent or sense of humor she would be allowed to behold. She also looked forward to the attendant spying that came with the job. Beyond the photos and knickknacks on the piano that she tried to piece together into a story, she was curious about the life of the house and the people in it. It wasn’t an openhearted interest in her fellow humans. In observing how other people lived, she was looking for something. Maybe instructions or tips, like a recipe. Everyone else’s life seemed to make sense in a way that hers didn’t quite. Theirs looked like complete books, with covers and tables of contents, whereas, if someone walked into her house, even though everything looked attractive and considered, they would be more likely to get a sense of unfinished passages full of ellipses. Would her life even be of any interest to anyone? What could it show them? Who observed her? Will seemed oblivious to much of it, though he thought he knew her better than she knew herself. Ruth and Lillian were not around enough. Abby, perhaps, with her keen eye and her withheld commentary.

Bea probably knew her best. She was absorbing everything by mere proximity, and Flora could tell that Bea was an observer like herself. She loved writing stories and reading them aloud to an audience—she and Will, or she and Abby when Abby came to pick her up after school, or the ideal venue of a small cocktail gathering with exuberant and appreciative fans Grace and Gordon, or Esther and Lou on a rare Friday evening. Often Flora recognized Bea’s stories as near replicas of the stories in her books or from TV shows with her own flourishes added, more homage than parody. Maybe one day she would write a book about Flora. The people who knew Flora would find it surprising that she wouldn’t object to having her life revealed. “Flora? No, she’s too private. She doesn’t want you to know anything,” they’d say. But in truth she fantasized about broadcasting her inner workings, to both let them breathe but also to judge, by the imagined reaction to her revelations, is it just me?

This recurring daydream, every so often, took the form of a television talk show. Not Johnny Carson, whose tiresome goal was only ever sexual innuendo. She would be a guest of Dick Cavett, who was charming and witty. Leaning toward her from his tan leather swivel chair, Dick would say, “Flora, you worked for many years as a social worker. Now you teach piano lessons, isn’t that right?”

Flora, wearing the gray silk suit with ruby trim on the sleeves and skirt that Ingrid Bergman had worn on the same set, would be sitting with one leg crossed over the other, her hands clasped and elbows resting confidently and relaxedly on the matching tan leather swivel chair. She would give a single nod and smile.

“Why did you stop doing that noble work?”

“In many ways, I don’t feel as though I have stopped being a social worker. I’ve simply changed venues and populations.”

Cavett, chin in hand, is attentive to Flora’s public self-reflection. “Say more about that,” he gently prods.

Flora would then deliver an eloquent declamation about the vulnerability within all of us, a speech that was never fully realized verbatim in her daydream but one she was sure would come across as authentic and not at all cloying. In more fanciful renditions of the daydream, she and Dick would spontaneously sing the first two lines of “What the World Needs Now” and laugh warmly and the audience would applaud. Where had her self-assurance gone, that youthful authority she once—at least once—had access to, so that now it only existed in a daydream?

When her thoughts spun ceaselessly around the axis of that recurring source of guilt related to her work, the imagined performance was momentarily curative. As if explaining her reasons once again to herself, and now to an imagined viewing audience of millions, might finally put the matter to bed. The thought of revealing herself in such a flagrant way invoked thrill and terror. She pictured Ruth and Lillian in their separate homes watching. They would be star-struck and envious but mostly surprised to know their sister harbored the thoughts that she aired and hurt that she told Dick Cavett on national television before telling them.

They would be just as surprised to learn that sometimes Flora had overwhelming urges to smoke and dance and be wild and expressive. Sometimes, on the rare occasions when she would have on something other than public radio, she might hear a song in the middle of a weekday and she would dance provocatively, moving all about the kitchen, living room and TV room like Isadora Duncan, at first stiff and certain that Freddy the gardener or one of the neighbors could somehow see her, but then letting the motion take over so that it almost felt like someone else was doing it to her, like a massage. But it had to be the right song—she had learned from Abby and her friends, without their knowing, that she had an affinity for soul and Motown, but she would never let on to anyone what this was the case. All the stars had to be aligned. She knew Will would be delighted and titillated if she started behaving that way in the bedroom, but she didn’t want to share it with him. It was only for her. It was too late in life to be revealing that unexposed person, real as she was. She would have to stay hidden and only let out for fresh air when she was alone and only on occasion.