The Little Friend (65 page)

“Uh,” he said, cruelly, looking over her head—clouds, an airplane trailing across the sky—“I think I have to
go
now.”

He waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t, he sauntered away—not his usual scurrying gait, but self-consciously, swinging his arms.

The gate snapped shut. Harriet stared furiously at the ground. The voices on the porch had risen sharply, and, with a dull pain, Harriet became aware of what they were talking about: Libby’s will. “Where it is?” Odean was saying.

“Don’t worry, that’ll all be taken care of soon enough,” said Edie, taking Odean’s arm as if to guide her inside. “The will’s in her safe-deposit box. On Monday morning I’ll go with the lawyer—”

“I aint trust n’an lawyer,” Odean said fiercely. “Miss Lib made me a promise. She told me, she say, Odean, if anything happen, look there in my cedar chest. There’s an envelope in there for you. You just go on and do it and don’t ast nobody.”

“Odean, we haven’t touched any of her things. On Monday—”

“The Lord knows what went on,” said Odean haughtily. “He knows it, and
I
know it. Yes, maam, I surely do know what Miss Libby told me.”

“You know Mr. Billy Wentworth, don’t you?” Edie’s voice jocular, as if speaking to a child, but with a hoarseness that edged on something terrifying. “Don’t tell me that you don’t trust Mr. Billy, Odean! That’s in practice with his son-in-law down there on the square?”

“Alls I want is what’s coming to me.”

The garden glider was rusted. Moss swelled velvety between the cracked bricks. Harriet, with a kind of desperate, clenching effort, fixed the whole of her attention upon a battered conch shell lying at the base of a garden urn.

Edie said: “Odean, I’m not
disputing
that. You’ll get what’s legally yours. As soon as—”

“I don’t know about any legal. Alls I know is what’s right.”

The conch was chalky with age, weathered to a texture like crumbly plaster; its apex had broken off; at the inner lip, it sank into a pearly flush, the delicate silvery-pink of Edie’s old Maiden’s Blush roses. Before Harriet was born, the whole family had vacationed on the Gulf every year; after Robin died, they never went back. Jars of tiny gray bivalves collected on those old trips sat on high shelves in the aunts’ closets, dusty and sad. “They lose their magic when they’ve been out of the water a while,” Libby said: and she’d run the bathroom sink full of water, poured the shells in and pulled over a step-stool for Harriet to stand on (she’d been tiny, around three, and how gigantic and white the sink had seemed!). And how surprised she had been to see that uniform gray washed bright and slick and magical, broken into a thousand tinkling colors: empurpled here, soaked there to mussel-black, fanned into ribs and spiraling into delicate polychrome whorls: silver, marble-blue, coral and pearly green and rose! How cold and clear was the water: her own hands, cut off at the wrist, icy-pink and tender! “Smell!” said Libby, breathing deep. “That’s what the ocean smells like!” And Harriet put her face close to the water and smelled the stiff tang of an ocean she had never seen; the salt smell that Jim Hawkins spoke of in
Treasure Island
. Crash of the surf; scream of strange birds and the white sails of the
Hispaniola
—like the white pages of a book—billowing against cloudless hot skies.

Death—they all said—was a happy shore. In the old seaside photographs, her family was young again, and Robin stood among them: boats and white handkerchiefs, sea-birds lifting into light. It was a dream where everybody was saved.

But it was a dream of life past, not life to come. Life present: rusty magnolia leaves, lichen-crusted flowerpots, the hum of bees steady in the hot afternoon and the faceless murmurs of the funeral guests. Mud and slimy grass, under the cracked garden brick she’d kicked aside. Harriet studied the ugly spot on the ground with great attention, as if it were the one true thing in the world—which, in a way, it was.

Time was broken. Harriet’s way of measuring it was gone. Before, Ida was the planet whose round marked the hours, and her bright old reliable course (washing on Mondays and mending on Tuesdays, sandwiches in summer and soup in winter) ruled every aspect of Harriet’s life. The weeks revolved in procession, each day a series of sequential vistas. On Thursday mornings, Ida set up the board and ironed by the sink, steam gasping from the monolithic iron; on Thursday afternoons, winter and summer, she shook the rugs and beat them and hung them out to air, so the red Turkey carpet slung on the porch rail was a flag that always said
Thursday
. Endless summer Thursdays, chill Thursdays in October and distant dark Thursdays of the first-grade past, when Harriet dozed beneath hot blankets, fitful with tonsillitis: the whap of the rug beater and the hiss and burble of the steam iron were vivid sounds of the present but also links in a chain winding back through Harriet’s life until vanishing in the abstract darks of babyhood. Days ended at five, with Ida’s change of aprons on the back porch; days began with the squeak of the front door and Ida’s tread in the hall. Peacefully, the hum of
the vacuum cleaner floated from distant rooms; upstairs and down, the slumbrous creak of Ida’s rubber-soled shoes, and sometimes the high dry cackle of her witchy laughter. So the days slid by. Doors opened, doors shut, shadows that sank and rose. Ida’s quick glance, as Harriet ran barefoot by an open doorway, was a sharp, delicious blessing: love in spite of itself. Ida! Her favored snacks (stick candy; molasses on cold cornbread); her “programs.” Jokes and scolding, heaped spoons of sugar sinking like snow to the bottom of the iced-tea glass. Strange old sad songs floating up from the kitchen (
don’t you miss your mother sometimes, sometimes?
) and birdcalls from the back yard, while the white shirts flapped on the line, whistles and trills,
kit kit, kit kit
, sweet jingle of polished silver, tumbling in the dish-pan, the variety and noise of life itself.

But all this was gone. Without Ida, time dilated and sank into a vast, shimmering emptiness. Hours and days, and light and darkness, slid into each other unremarked; there was no difference any more between lunch and breakfast, week-end and week-day, dawn or dusk; and it was like living deep in a cave lit by artificial lights.

With Ida had vanished many comforts. Among them was sleep. Night after night, in dank Chickadee Wigwam, Harriet had lain awake in gritty sheets with tears in her eyes—for no one but Ida knew how to make the bed the way she liked it, and Harriet (in motels, sometimes even at Edie’s house) lay open-eyed and miserable with homesickness late into the night, painfully aware of strange textures, unfamiliar smells (perfume, mothballs, detergents that Ida didn’t use), but more than anything else of Ida’s touch, indefinable, always reassuring when she woke up lonely or afraid, and never more lovely than when it wasn’t there.

But Harriet had returned to echoes and silence: a spellbound house, encircled with thorns. On Harriet’s side of the room (Allison’s was a mess) everything was perfect, just as Ida had left it: tidy bed, white ruffles, dust settling like frost.

And so it remained. Underneath the coverlet, the sheets were still crisp. They had been washed and smoothed by Ida’s hand; they were the last trace of Ida in the house, and—as much as Harriet longed to crawl into her bed, to bury her face
in the lovely soft pillow and pull the clothes up over her head—she could not bring herself to disturb this last small Heaven left to her. At night, the reflection of the bed floated radiant and transparent in the black windowpanes, a flouncy white confection, as soft as a wedding cake. But it was a feast that Harriet could only look at, and long for: for once the bed was slept in, even the hope of sleep was lost.

So she slept on top of the covers. The nights passed fitfully. Mosquitos bit her legs and whined about her ears. The early mornings were cool, and sometimes Harriet sat up foggily to reach for phantom bedclothes; when her hands closed on air, she fell back on the coverlet, with a
plump
, and—twitching like a terrier in her sleep—she dreamed. She dreamed of black swamp water with ice in it, and country paths she had to run down again and again with a splinter in her foot from being barefoot; of swimming upward through dark lakes, knocking her head against a sheet of metal that sealed her underwater, away from the surface air; of hiding under the bed at Edie’s house from some creepy presence—unseen—who called out to her in a low voice: “Did you leave something, missy? Did you leave me something?” In the morning she woke late and exhausted, red patterns from the bedspread stamped deep into her cheek. And even before she opened her eyes, she was afraid to move, and lay still in the breathless consciousness that she was waking to something wrong.

And so she was. The house was frighteningly dim and still. When she got out of bed and tiptoed to the window and pushed aside the curtain, it was with a sense of being the sole survivor of a terrible disaster. Monday: clothesline empty. How could it be Monday with no sheets and shirts snapping on the line? The shadow of the empty clothesline jangled across the dry grass. Downstairs she crept, down into the murky hall—for now that Ida was gone, there was no one to open the blinds in the morning (or to make coffee, or call “Good Morning, Baby!” or do any of the comforting little things that Ida did) and the house remained sunk for most of the day in a filtered, underwater gloom.

Underlying the vapid silence—a terrible silence, as if the world had ended and most of the people in it had died—was
the painful awareness of Libby’s house shut up and vacant only a few streets away. Lawn unmowed, flower beds browned and sizzling with weeds; inside, the mirrors empty pools without reflection and the sunlight and the moonlight gliding indifferently through the rooms. How well Harriet knew Libby’s house in all its hours and moods and weathers—its winter dullness, when the hall was dim and the gas fire burned low; its stormy nights and days (rain streaming down purple windowpanes, shadows streaming down the opposite wall) and its blazing autumn afternoons, when Harriet sat in Libby’s kitchen tired and disconsolate after school, taking heart in Libby’s small talk, and basking in the glow of her kindly inquiries. All the books Libby had read aloud, a chapter each day after school:
Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Ivanhoe
. Sometimes the October light that flared up suddenly in the west windows on those afternoons was clinical, terrifying in its radiance, and its brilliance and chill seemed like a promise of something unbearable, like the inhuman glow of old memories recalled on a deathbed, all dreams and lurid farewells. But always, even in the most still, desolate lights (leaden tick of mantel clock, library book face down on the sofa) Libby herself shone pale and bright as she moved through the gloomy rooms, with her white head ruffled like a peony. Sometimes she sang to herself, and her reedy voice quavered sweetly in the high shadows of the tiled kitchen, over the fat hum of the Frigidaire:

There she was, embroidering, with her tiny silver scissors hung on a pink ribbon around her neck, working the crossword or reading a biography of Madame de Pompadour, talking to her little white cat
 … tip tip tip
, Harriet could hear her footsteps now, the particular sound of them in her size-three shoe,
tip tip tip
down the long hallway to answer the telephone. Libby! How glad Libby always seemed when Harriet called—even late at night—as if there were no one in the
world whose voice she so wanted to hear! “Oh! It’s my
darling!
” she cried; “how
sweet
of you to call your poor old auntie …”; and the gaiety and warmth of her voice thrilled Harriet so much that (even alone, standing by the wall phone in the dark kitchen) she shut her eyes and hung her head, warmed and glowing all over, like a chimed bell. Did anyone else seem so happy to hear from Harriet? No: no one did. Now she might dial that number, dial it all she pleased, dial it every moment until the end of time and she would never hear Libby crying at the other end: My darling! my
dear!
No: the house was empty now, and still. Smells of cedar and vetivert in closed rooms. Soon the furniture would be gone, but for now everything was exactly as it was when Libby set out on her trip: beds made, washed teacups stacked in the dish drainer. Days sweeping through the rooms in unremarked procession. As the sun rose, the bubbled glass paperweight on Libby’s mantelpiece would glow again into life, its little gleaming life of three hours, only to sink into darkness and slumber again when the triangle of sunlight passed over it, at noon. The flower-twined carpet—vast tangled game board of Harriet’s childhood—glowed here, glowed there, with the yellow bars of light that slashed through the wooden blinds in the late afternoons. Around the walls they slid, long fingers, passing in long distorted strands across the framed photographs: Libby as a girl, thin and frightened-looking, holding Edie’s hand; stormy old Tribulation, in sepia tone, with its thundery air of vine-choked tragedy. That evening light too would fade and vanish, until there was no light at all except the cool blue half-light of the street lamps—just enough to see by—glimmering steadily until the dawn. Hatboxes; gloves neatly folded, slumbering in drawers. Clothes that would never know Libby’s touch again, hanging in dark closets. Soon they would be packed away in boxes and sent to Baptist missions in Africa and China—and soon, perhaps, some tiny Chinese lady in a painted house, under golden trees and faraway skies, would be drinking tea with the missionaries in one of Libby’s pink Sunday-school dresses. How did the world go on the way it did: people planting gardens, playing cards, going to Sunday school and sending boxes of old clothes to the
China missions and speeding all the while toward a collapsed bridge gaping in the dark?

So Harriet brooded. She sat alone on the stairs, in the hall or at the kitchen table, with her head in her hands; she sat on the window seat in her bedroom and looked down at the street. Old memories scratched and pricked at her: sulks, ungratefulness, words she could never take back. Again and again she thought of the time she’d caught black beetles in the garden and stuck them into the top of a coconut cake Libby had worked all day to make. And how Libby had cried, like a little girl, cried with her face in her hands. Libby had cried, too, when Harriet got mad on her eighth birthday and told Libby she hated her present: a heart-shaped charm for her charm bracelet. “A toy! I wanted a
toy!
” Later, Harriet’s mother had pulled her aside and told her the charm was expensive, more than Libby could afford. Worst: the last time she’d seen Libby, the last time ever, Harriet had shrugged her hand off, run down the sidewalk without looking back. Sometimes, during the course of the listless day (dazed hours on the sofa, paging dully through the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
) these thoughts struck Harriet with such fresh force that she crawled in the closet and closed the door and cried, cried with her face in the taffeta skirts of her mother’s dusty old party dresses, sick with the certainty that what she felt was never going to get anything but worse.