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"Florence McCready"

by Michael Finley
(c) 2001 by Michael Finley

"Tom, here's a story that tells you everything about our little town," said Gil, the publisher of the newspaper that had just hired me. Gil loved to tell stories. When he had a good one, he sometimes paused in the telling to close his owlish eyes and smile at the power that shivered in it.

"You know our society editor, Flo McCready."

Indeed I did. Florence was a lively, sharp-tongued but decent reporter with the paper. She published the wedding notices and recipes, plus a very mild gossip column she wrote mainly involving who was visiting whom from out of town. As mild as it was, some folks in town still thought she came on too fresh and too strong. Can't we just let things be, they said. Must we stick our noses into other people's parlors?

But they kept reading, and Flo kept writing. I liked Flo for her edge, not as a writer so much, than as a person. She was a small woman about five foot in flats, with a funny smirk that put me in mind of Judy Garland, if she had stayed Judy Gumm all her life and never ventured out of Grand Rapids. At 42 she was steady and smart. I felt, when I talked to her, that she might hint at just about anything. Not say it out loud; that wouldn't do in a small town. Just to intimate that such things occurred caused the cracking of ancient chains.

"Here in Alastair we don't have to hate anything. We just say it's different."

"Prairie families are unusually close. Winters are long and farmers get used to their wives."

"There goes Agnes Svengstad," she said to me once as we hurried into a café. "Ask me sometime about her zucchini squash."

Something at some point had liberated Florence. Perhaps it was the summer she spent in London in 1968 with a girlfriend, seeing plays at the West End and laughing at the Kensington gentlemen. Perhaps it was her divorce a decade later to the head of the ag studies program at the junior college, after only a year of marriage. Out of that or some other experience, she was willing now to bear down on you with an intense, canny look that would follow you anywhere, hint at all sorts of improprieties without actually saying much, and the hell with the consequences. She was not a teller of truths so much as a reminder that there was such a thing as the truth. In a small town, where so many things are swept under the braid rug, and then a chair is placed on it to weigh it down, that was plenty. I liked her.

"Well, what you don't know, what nobody knows about Flo, is that she wasn't born a McCready. The story I am about to tell you came from her half-sister Josephine, who told it to me before she moved to Cuero, Texas.

"Florence was the daughter of an unmarried 17-year-old girl from down in Iowa, named Peterson. She had got pregnant with some fellow, and came up here to Barnum County to a home where girls could go to term in those days and give their babies up. Miss Peterson had the baby, gave it up, then returned home. After about 60 days Flo was adopted by a middle-aged couple named McCready. He worked the second night shift doing maintenance at the grain elevator. She was a stay at home mom.

"That should have been the end of the story. But the thought of the baby began to weigh on the Peterson woman. Three years later, she moved to our town. Somehow she found out that Flo was born the same day as her baby. In small towns, you can learn things like this. So the Peterson woman did something very bold -- she bought the lot right next to the McCreadys, and proceeded to park a mobile home on the lot, and make her home there. She took a job at the local frozen food company, breading shrimp.

"And she became a good neighbor to Allen and Mary McCready. She kept an eye on the house when they went away. She made zucchini bread for them when August came around. She smoked Winstons 101s, but she never smoked in the McCready house. And she offered to babysit the little girl, with whom she seemed to get along so naturally, playing pattycake, and planting hydrangeas in a tractor tire ring out by the mailbox, and going for walks by Lake Hornung when her mom was out shopping. The McCreadys were Congregationalists going back to the boat that landed just after the Mayflower, or the one after that; Alma Peterson attended the Evangelical Lutheran church a block away, but never took communion.

"At no time did she ever behave like anything but a good neighbor and friend. At no time did Mary McCready suspect she was anything but those things. At no time did the little girl suspect she was adopted.

"When Florence was a freshman in high school, her father Allen McCready died. He was 58, and a sudden heart attack at the elevator did him in. When Flo was a junior, her adoptive mother was diagnosed with cancer. The Peterson woman was at Mary McCready's side for the better part of a year, helping Flo with her schoolwork, helping around the house, and finally, toward the end, nursing Mary through the last painful weeks of her life. At the funeral, she stood in the pew behind Flo and sang "Old Wooden Cross" in her strained soprano in her daughter's ear.

"Then a new chapter began between Flo and her birth mother. They became adult friends, still living side by side. Flo went to the local college, obtaining a degree in speech and communications, and Alma Peterson cheered her on. Flo married a dispatcher for a trucking company, and they stayed married for four years, having one child, a little boy named Adam.

"Then they split up. Alma listened to Flo pour out her tale of woe, and encouraged the young woman to stand her ground. Alma gave a deposition in the divorce, and afterwards, began babysitting for Adam when Flo went to her new job at the newspaper managing as manager of the morgue, the backlog of all the paper's stories.

"It was in the morgue that Flo, idly looking through back issues, found an odd birth notice, for an unnamed girl on the same date as her birth, to a woman named Peterson -- and no notice of a girl born to the McCready family.

"Flo was always so smart. She went to the courthouse and asked, as a reporter, to look at the child's live birth records. There she saw, under Identifying Characteristics, mention of the rose-colored birthmark on the right earlobe.

"She understood in a flood all that had transpired. Her mother was not her mother; her neighbor was. All that feeling, compressed into two city lots alongside an irrigation ditch. What was required of her now?

"She decided that the best thing was to continue the pretense. She did not want to embarrass her birth mother. Nor did she want to diminish the achievement of her adoptive mother, who had kept this information from her, and never given her reason to wonder about her origin or her place in her mother's heart.

"And so it continued, mother and daughter living side by side as neighbors, neither giving the other for thirty years any hint that she knew the identity of the other.

"And it happened that in her sixty-eighth year Alma Peterson also came down with cancer, of the lungs, and this time it was Flo's turn to be the nurse. She finally took Alma into her house, and put her in the bed her mother had died in.

"In the end, the older woman was coughing up tumor and gasping for breath, but Flo did not call for an ambulance. On the twelfth of February, 1976, a few minutes after midnight, Alma Peterson died in her daughter's arms, their secret never conceded.

"But in the last six weeks of Alma Peterson's life, Florence McCready looked into her eyes with greater devotion that one could expect from a mere neighbor. Florence understood that a young woman who had been unable to give her life to her child at first wound up giving all that and more.

"And the daughter, knowing the terrible loving truth, but too respectful of her mother to break the rules of the game and express it in words, kept her part of the bargain as well."

mfinley.com 
_{COPYRIGHT (c) 2001
by MICHAEL FINLEY}

Mike is available to write for your publication or organization right now. Call him at 651-644-4540. Or e-mail him.

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