The Little Friend (13 page)

Sixty seconds. Sixty-five. The rose-pink stripes in the
draperies had darkened to a bloody color and the light from the lamp unravelled in long, iridescent tentacles which ebbed and flowed with the wash of some invisible tide, before they, too, began to darken, blackening around the pulsating edges though the centers still burned white and somewhere she heard a wasp buzzing, somewhere near her ear though maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was coming from somewhere inside her; the room was whirling and suddenly she couldn’t pinch her nose shut any longer, her hand was trembling and wouldn’t do what she told it to and with a long, agonized rasp, she fell backward on the sofa in a shower of sparks, clicking the stopwatch with her thumb.

For a long time she lay there, panting, as the phosphorescent fairy lights drifted gently from the ceiling.

A glass hammer pounded, with crystalline pings, at the base of her skull. Her thoughts spooled up and unwound in complex ormolu tracery which floated in delicate patterns around her head.

When the sparks slowed, and she was finally able to sit up—dizzy, grasping the back of the sofa—she looked at the stopwatch. One minute and sixteen seconds.

This was a long time, longer than she’d expected on the first try, but Harriet felt very queer. Her eyes ached and it was as if the whole ingredients of her head were jostled and crunched together, so that hearing was mixed up with sight and sight with taste and her thoughts were jumbled up with all this like a jigsaw puzzle so she couldn’t tell which piece went where.

She tried to stand up. It was like trying to stand up in a canoe. She sat down again. Echoes, black bells.

Well: nobody had said it was going to be easy. If it was easy, learning to hold your breath for three minutes, then everybody in the world would be doing it and not just Houdini.

She sat still for some minutes, breathing deeply as they had taught her in swimming class, and when she felt slightly more herself she took another deep breath and clicked the watch.

This time, she was determined not to look at the numbers
as they ticked by, but to concentrate on something else. Looking at the numbers made it worse.

As her discomfort increased, and her heart pounded louder, sparkling needle-pricks pattered quickly over her scalp in icy waves, like raindrops. Her eyes burned. She closed them. Against the throbbing red darkness rained a spectacular drizzle of cinders. A black trunk bound with chains clattered across the loose stones of a riverbed, swept by the current,
thump thump, thump thump
—something heavy and soft, a body inside—and her hand flew up to pinch her nose as if against a bad smell but still the suitcase rolled along, over the mossy stones, and an orchestra was playing somewhere, in a gilded theatre ablaze with chandeliers, and Harriet heard Edie’s clear soprano, soaring high above the violins:
“Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep. Sailor, beware: sailor, take care.”

No, it wasn’t Edie, it was a tenor: a tenor with black brilliantined hair and a gloved hand pressed to his tuxedo front, his powdered face chalk-white in the footlights, his eyes and lips darkened like an actor in a silent movie. He stood in front of the fringed velvet curtains as slowly they parted—amid a ripple of applause—to reveal, center stage, an enormous block of ice with a hunched figure frozen in the middle.

A gasp. The flustered orchestra, which was composed mostly of penguins, struck up the tempo. The gallery was filled with jostling polar bears, several of whom wore Santa Claus hats. They had come in late and were having a disagreement over the seating. In their midst sat Mrs. Godfrey, glassy-eyed, who sat eating ice cream from a harlequin-patterned dish.

Suddenly, the lights dimmed. The tenor bowed and stepped into the wings. One of the polar bears craned over the balcony and—throwing his Santa hat high in the air—roared: “Three cheers for Captain Scott!”

There was a deafening commotion as blue-eyed Scott, his furs stiff with blubber grease and coated with ice, stepped onto the stage shaking the snow from his clothes and lifted a mittened hand to the audience. Behind him little Bowers—on skis—emitted a low, mystified whistle, squinting into the
footlights and raising an arm to shield his sunburnt face. Dr. Wilson—hatless and gloveless, with ice crampons on his boots—hurried past him and onto the stage, leaving behind him a trail of snowy footprints which dissolved instantly into puddles under the stage lights. Ignoring the burst of applause, he ran a hand across the block of ice, made a notation or two in a leather-bound notebook. Then he snapped the notebook shut and the audience fell silent.

“Conditions critical, Captain,” he said, his breath coming out white. “Winds are blowing from the north-northwest and there seems to be a distinct difference of origin between the upper and lower portions of the berg, suggesting that it has accumulated layer by layer from seasonal snows.”

“Then, we shall have to commence the rescue immediately,” said Captain Scott. “Osman!
Esh to,
” he said impatiently to the sled dog which barked and jumped around him. “The ice axes, Lieutenant Bowers.”

Bowers seemed not at all surprised to discover that his ski poles had turned into a pair of axes in his mittened fists. He tossed one deftly across the stage to his captain, to a wild din of honks and roars and clapped flippers, and, shouldering off their snow-crumbled woolens, the two of them began to hack at the frozen block as the penguin orchestra struck up again and Dr. Wilson continued to provide interesting scientific commentary about the nature of the ice. A flurry of snow had begun to whirl gently from the proscenium. At the edge of the stage, the brilliantined tenor was assisting Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, in setting up his tripod.

“The poor chap,” said Captain Scott, between blows of the axe—he and Bowers were not making a great deal of headway—“is very near the end, one feels.”

“Hurry it up there, Captain.”

“Good cheer, lads,” roared a polar bear from the gallery.

“We are in the hands of God, and unless He intervenes we are lost,” said Dr. Wilson somberly. Sweat stood out in beads on his temples and the stage lights glinted in white discs across the lenses of his little old-fashioned glasses. “All hands join in saying the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed.”

Not everyone seemed to know the Lord’s Prayer. Some
penguins sang
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do;
others, flippers over hearts, recited the Pledge of Allegiance when over the stage—head first, lowered by the ankles from a corkscrewing chain—appeared the strait-jacketed, manacled form of a man in evening dress. A hush fell over the audience as—twisting, thrashing, red in the face—he wriggled free of the strait-jacket and shouldered it over his head. With his teeth, he set to work on the manacles; in a moment or two they clattered to the planks and then—nimbly doubling up and freeing his feet—he swung from the chain suspended ten feet above the ground and landed, arm high, with a gymnast’s flourish, doffing a top hat which appeared from nowhere. A battery of pink doves flapped out and began to dip around the theatre, to the audience’s delight.

“I am afraid that conventional methods will not work here, gentlemen,” said this newcomer to the startled explorers, rolling up the sleeves of his evening coat and pausing, for an instant, to smile brilliantly for the explosive flash of the camera. “I nearly perished twice while attempting this very feat—once in the Cirkus Beketow in Copenhagen and once in the Apollo Theatre in Nuremberg.” From thin air, he produced a jeweled blowtorch, which shot a blue flame three feet long, and then produced a pistol which he fired into the air with a loud crack and a puff of smoke. “Assistants, please!”

Five Chinamen in scarlet robes and skullcaps, long black queues down their backs, ran out with fireaxes and hacksaws.

Houdini tossed the pistol into the audience—which, to the delight of the penguins, transformed into a thrashing salmon in mid-air before it landed amongst them—and grabbed from Captain Scott the pickaxe. With his left hand, he brandished it high in the air, while the blowtorch burned in his right. “May I remind the audience,” he shouted, “that the subject in question has been deprived of life-sustaining oxygen for four thousand six hundred sixty-five days, twelve hours, twenty-seven minutes, and thirty-nine seconds, and that a recovery attempt of this magnitude has never before been attempted on the North American stage.” He threw the pickaxe back to Captain Scott and, reaching up to stroke the orange cat
perched on his shoulder, tossed his head at the penguin conductor. “Maestro,
if
you please.”

The Chinamen—under the cheerful direction of Bowers, who was stripped to the singlet and working shoulder-to-shoulder among them—hacked rhythmically at the block in time with the music. Houdini was making spectacular headway with the blowtorch. A great puddle spread across the stage: the penguin musicians, with great pleasure, shimmied happily beneath the icy water dripping into the orchestra pit. Captain Scott, to stage left, was doing his best to restrain the sled dog, Osman—who had gone berserk upon spotting Houdini’s cat—and was shouting angrily into the wings for Meares to come assist him.

The mysterious figure in the bubbled block of ice was now only about six inches from the blowtorch and the Chinamen’s hacksaws.

“Courage,” roared a polar bear from the gallery.

Another bear leaped to his feet. He held, in his enormous baseball mitt of a paw, a struggling dove, and he chomped its head off and spat it out in a bloody chunk.

Harriet wasn’t sure what was happening on stage, though it seemed very important. Sick with impatience, she craned up on tiptoe but the penguins—jibbing and chattering, standing on one another’s shoulders—were taller than she. Several of them wobbled from their seats, and began to totter toward the stage at a forward list, ducking and wobbling, bills tipped to the ceiling, their wall-eyes loony with concern. As she shoved through their ranks, she was pushed hard from behind, and got an oily mouthful of penguin feathers as she stumbled forward.

Suddenly there was a triumphant shout from Houdini. “Ladies and Gentlemen!” he cried. “We’ve got him!”

The crowd swarmed the stage. Harriet, in the confusion, glimpsed the white explosions of Ponting’s old-fashioned camera, a gang of bobbies rushing in, with handcuffs and billy clubs and service revolvers.

“This way, officers!” said Houdini, stepping forward with an elegant sweep of his arm.

Smoothly, unexpectedly, all heads swung round to Harriet. An awful silence had fallen, unbroken but for the
tick tick tick
of the melted ice dripping into the orchestra pit. Everyone was watching her: Captain Scott, startled little Bowers, Houdini with black brows lowered over his basilisk gaze. The penguins, in unblinking left profile, leaned forward all at once, each fixing her with a yellow, fishy eye.

Somebody was trying to hand her something.
It’s up to you, my dear.…

Harriet sat bolt upright on the sofa downstairs.

————

“Well, Harriet,” said Edie briskly, when Harriet turned up, late, at her back door for breakfast. “Where have you been? We missed you at church yesterday.”

She untied her apron, without taking notice of Harriet’s silence or even of the rumpled daisy dress. She was in an unusually chipper mood, for Edie, and she was all dressed up, in a navy-blue summer suit and spectator pumps to match.

“I was about to start without you,” she said, as she sat down to her toast and coffee. “Is Allison coming? I’m going to a meeting.”

“Meeting of what?”

“At the church. Your aunts and I are going on a trip.”

This was news, even in Harriet’s dazed state. Edie and the aunts never went anywhere. Libby had scarcely even been outside Mississippi; and she and the other aunts were gloomy and terrified for days if they had to venture more than a few miles from home. The water tasted funny, they murmured; they couldn’t sleep in a strange bed; they were worried that they’d left the coffee on, worried about their houseplants and their cats, worried that there would be a fire or someone would break into their houses or that the End of the World would happen while they were away. They would have to use commodes in filling stations—commodes which were filthy, with no telling what diseases on them. People in strange restaurants didn’t care about Libby’s saltfree diet. And what if the car broke down? What if somebody got sick?

“We’re going in August,” said Edie. “To Charleston. On a tour of historic homes.”

“You’re driving?” Though Edie refused to admit it, her eyesight was not what it had been and she sailed through red lights, turning left against traffic and jerking to dead stops as she leaned over the back seat to chat with her sisters—who, hunting through their pocketbooks for tissues and peppermints, were as sweetly oblivious as Edie herself to the exhausted, hollow-eyed guardian angel who hovered with lowered wings above the Oldsmobile, averting fireball collisions at every turn.

“All the ladies from our church circle are going,” Edie said, crunching busily on her toast. “Roy Dial, from the Chevrolet dealership, is lending us a bus. And a driver. I wouldn’t mind taking my car if people out on the highway didn’t act so nutty these days.”

“And Libby said she would go?”

“Certainly. Why shouldn’t she? Mrs. Hatfield Keene and Mrs. Nelson McLemore and all her friends are going.”

“Addie, too? And Tat?”

“Certainly.”

“And they
want
to go? Nobody’s making them?”

“Your aunts and I aren’t getting any younger.”

“Listen, Edie,” said Harriet abruptly, swallowing a mouthful of biscuit. “Will you give me ninety dollars?”

“Ninety dollars?”
said Edie, suddenly ferocious. “Certainly not. What in the world do you want ninety dollars for?”

“Mother let our membership at the Country Club lapse.”

“What can you possibly want over at the Country Club?”

“I want to go swimming this summer.”

“Make that little Hull boy take you as his guest.”

“He can’t. He’s only allowed to bring a guest five times. I’m going to want to go more than that.”