The Little Friend (67 page)

————

“What’s Ida’s address?” Harriet asked Allison one morning. “I want to write and tell her about Libby.”

The house was hot and still; dirty laundry was heaped in great grimy swags on top of the washing machine. Allison looked up blankly from her bowl of cornflakes.

“No,” said Harriet, after a long moment of disbelief.

Allison glanced away. She had recently started wearing dark makeup on her eyes, and it gave her an evasive, uncommunicative look.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t get it! What’s wrong with you?”

“She didn’t give it to me.”

“Didn’t you
ask?
”

Silence.

“Well, didn’t you? What’s the matter with you?”

“She knows where we live,” said Allison. “If she wants to write.”

“Sweetheart?” Their mother’s voice, in the next room: helpful, infuriating. “Are you looking for something?”

After a long pause, Allison—her eyes down—resumed eating. The crunch of her cornflakes was nauseatingly loud, like the magnified crunch of some leaf-eating insect on a nature program. Harriet pushed back in her chair, cast her eyes about the room in useless panic: what town had Ida said, what town exactly, what was her daughter’s married name? And would it make any difference, even if Harriet knew? In Alexandria, Ida hadn’t had a telephone. Whenever they needed to get in touch with Ida, Edie had to get in the car and drive over to Ida’s house—which wasn’t even a house, only a lopsided brown shack in a yard of packed dirt, no grass and no sidewalk, just mud. Smoke puffing from a rusty little metal stovepipe, up top, when Edie had stopped by one winter evening with Harriet in the car, bringing fruitcake and tangerines for Ida’s Christmas. The memory of Ida appearing in the doorway—surprised, in the car headlights, wiping her hands on a dirty apron—choked Harriet with a sudden, sharp grief. Ida hadn’t let them in, but the glimpse through the open door had flooded Harriet with confusion and sadness: old coffee cans, an oilcloth-covered table, the raggedy old smoky-smelling sweater—a man’s sweater—that Ida wore in the wintertime, hanging on a peg.

Harriet unfolded her fingers of her left hand and consulted, in private, the cut she’d made in the meat of her palm with a Swiss Army knife on the day after Libby’s funeral. In the suffocating misery of the quiet house, the stab wound had made her yelp aloud with surprise. The knife clattered to the floor of the bathroom. Fresh tears sprang to her eyes, which were already hot and sore from crying. Harriet wrung her hand and squeezed her lips tight as the black coins of blood dripped on the shadowy tile; around and around she looked, in the corners of the ceiling, as if expecting some help from above. The pain was a strange relief—icy and bracing, and in its harsh way it calmed her and concentrated her thoughts.
By the time this stops hurting
, she’d said to herself,
by the time it heals, I won’t feel so bad about Libby
.

And the cut
was
better. It didn’t hurt much any more,
except when she closed her hand a certain way. A wine-colored welt of scar tissue had bubbled up in the little stab hole; it was interesting to look at, like a small blob of pink glue, and it reminded her in a good way of Lawrence of Arabia, burning himself with matches. Evidently that sort of thing built soldierly character. “The trick,” he’d said in the movie, “is not to mind that it hurts.” In the vast and ingenious scheme of suffering, as Harriet was now beginning to understand it, this was a trick well worth learning.

————

So August passed. At Libby’s funeral, the preacher had read from the Psalms. “I watch, and am as a sparrow alone on the house top.” Time healed all wounds, he said. But when?

Harriet thought of Hely, playing his trombone on the football field in the blazing sun, and that too reminded her of the Psalms. “Praise Him with the trumpet, with psaltery and harp.” Hely’s feelings didn’t run very deep; he lived in sunny shallows where it was always warm and bright. He’d seen dozens of housekeepers come and go. Nor did he understand her grief over Libby. Hely didn’t like old people, was afraid of them; he didn’t like even his own grandparents, who lived in a different town.

But Harriet missed her grandmother and her great-aunts, and they were too busy to give her much attention. Tat was packing Libby’s things: folding her linens, polishing her silver, rolling up rugs and standing on ladders to take down curtains and trying to figure out what to do with the things in Libby’s cabinets and cedar chests and closets. “Darling, you are an angel to offer,” said Tat, when Harriet called her on the telephone and offered to help. But though Harriet ventured by, she had not been able to force herself to go up the front walk, so shocked was she by the drastically altered air of Libby’s house: the weedy flower bed, the shaggy lawn, the tragic note of neglect. The curtains were off Libby’s front windows, and their absence was shocking; inside, over the living-room mantel, there was only a big blind patch where the mirror had hung.

Harriet stood aghast on the sidewalk; she turned and ran
home. That night—feeling ashamed of herself—she called Tat to apologize.

“Well,” said Tat, in a voice not quite as friendly as Harriet would have liked. “I was wondering what happened.”

“I—I—”

“Darling, I’m tired,” said Tat; and she did sound exhausted. “Can I do something for you?”

“The house looks different.”

“Yes it does. It’s hard being over there. Yesterday I sat down at her poor little table in that kitchen full of boxes and cried and cried.”

“Tatty, I—” Harriet was crying herself.

“Listen, darling. You’re precious to think of Tatty but it’ll go faster if I’m by myself. Poor angel.” Now Tat was crying too. “We’ll do something nice when I’m finished, all right?”

Even Edie—as clear and constant as the profile stamped on a coin—had changed. She’d grown thinner since Libby died; her cheeks were sunken and she seemed smaller somehow. Harriet had hardly seen her since the funeral. Nearly every day she drove down to the square in her new car to meet with bankers or attorneys or accountants. Libby’s estate was a mess, mostly because of Judge Cleve’s bankruptcy, and his muddled attempts, at the end, to divide and conceal what remained of his assets. Much of this confusion reverberated through the tiny, tied-up inheritance he’d passed down to Libby. To make matters worse: Mr. Rixey, the old man whose car she’d hit, had filed a lawsuit against Edie, claiming “distress and mental anguish.” He would not settle; it seemed sure to mean a court case. Though Edie was tight-lipped and stoical about it, she was clearly distraught.

“Well, it
was
your fault, darling,” said Adelaide.

She’d had headaches, said Adelaide, since the accident; she wasn’t up to “fooling with boxes” over at Libby’s; she wasn’t herself. In the afternoons, after her nap (“Nap!” said Tat, as if she wouldn’t enjoy a nap herself) she walked down to Libby’s house and vacuumed carpets and upholstery (unnecessary) and re-organized boxes that Tatty had already packed, but mainly she worried aloud about Libby’s estate; and she provoked Tatty and Edie alike by her cordial but
transparent suspicion that Edie and the lawyers were cheating her, Adelaide, out of what she called her “share.” Every night she telephoned Edie to question her, in exasperating detail, about what had happened that day at the lawyers’ office (the lawyers were too expensive, she complained, she was fearful of her “share” being “eaten up” by legal fees); also to pass along Mr. Sumner’s advice about financial matters.

“Adelaide,” cried Edie for the fifth or sixth time, “I wish you wouldn’t tell that old man our business!”

“
Why not?
He’s a
family friend.
”

“He’s no friend of mine!”

Adelaide said, with a deadly cheerfulness: “I like to feel that someone has my interests at heart.”

“I suppose you don’t think I do.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did.”

This was nothing new. Adelaide and Edie had never got along—even as children—but never had the situation between them reached such an openly rancorous point. If Libby was alive, she would have made peace between them long before relations reached this crisis; would have pled with Adelaide for patience and discretion, and—with all the usual arguments—begged Edie for forbearance (“She
is
the baby … never had a mother … Papa spoiled Addie so …”).

But Libby was dead. And—with no one to mediate—the rift between Edie and Adelaide grew daily colder and more profound, to the point where Harriet (who was, after all, Edie’s granddaughter) had begun to feel an uncomfortable chill in Adelaide’s company. Harriet felt the unfairness of this all the more keenly because, formerly, whenever Addie and Edie quarrelled, Harriet had tended to take Addie’s side. Edie could be a bully: Harriet knew that only too well. Now, for the first time, she was starting to understand Edie’s side of the quarrel, and exactly what Edie meant by the word “petty.”

Mr. Sumner was back at home now—in South Carolina or wherever it was that he lived—but he and Adelaide had struck up a busy little correspondence that had Adelaide
humming with importance.
“Camellia Street,”
she’d said, as she showed Harriet the return address on one of the letters he’d sent her. “Isn’t that a lovely name? Streets around here don’t have names like that. How I would love to live on a street with such an elegant name.”

She held the envelope at arm’s length and—glasses low on her nose—surveyed it fondly. “He’s got a nice handwriting for a man too, doesn’t he?” she asked Harriet. “Neat. That’s what I’d call it, wouldn’t you? Oh, Daddy thought the world and all of Mr. Sumner.”

Harriet said nothing. According to Edie, the Judge had thought Mr. Sumner “fast and loose,” whatever that meant. And Tatty—the deciding opinion here—would say nothing about Mr. Sumner at all; but her manner suggested that she had nothing nice to say.

“I’m sure that you and Mr. Sumner would have lots of things to talk about,” Adelaide was saying. She had removed the card from the envelope and was glancing it over, front and back. “He’s very cosmopolitan. He used to live in Egypt, did you know that?”

As she spoke she was gazing at the picture—a scene of Old Charleston—on the front of the card; on the back of it, Harriet made out, in Mr. Sumner’s eloquent, old-fashioned penmanship, the phrases
something more to me
and
dear lady
.

“I thought you were interested in that, Harriet,” said Adelaide, holding the card out at arm’s length and surveying it with her head to one side. “All those old mummies and cats and things.”

Harriet blurted: “Are you and Mr. Sumner going to be engaged?”

Adelaide—with a distracted air—touched an earring. “Did your grandmother tell you to ask me that?”

Does she think I’m retarded?
“No, maam.”

“I hope,” said Adelaide, with a chilly laugh, “I hope I don’t seem so
very
old to you …” and, as she rose to walk Harriet to the door, she glanced at her reflection in the window glass in a way that made Harriet’s heart sink.

————

The days were very noisy. Heavy machinery—bulldozers, chainsaws—roared in the distance, three streets over. The Baptists were cutting down the trees and paving over the land around the church because they needed more parking, they said; the rumble in the distance was terrible, as if of tanks, an advancing army, pressing in on the quiet streets.

The library was closed; painters were working in the Children’s Room. They were painting it bright yellow, a slick shiny enamelled yellow that looked like taxicab paint. It was horrible. Harriet had loved the scholarly wood paneling, which had been there for as long as she could remember: how could they be painting over all that beautiful dark old wood? And the summer reading contest was over; and Harriet had not won it.

There was nobody to talk to, and nothing to do, and no place to go but the pool. Every day at one o’clock she put her towel under her arm and walked over. August was drawing to a close; football and cheerleading practice and even kindergarten had started, and—except for the retired people out on the golf course, and a few young housewives who lay roasting themselves on deck chairs—the Country Club was deserted. The air, for the most part, was as hot and still as glass. Every so often the sun passed under a cloud and a gust of hot wind swept through and wrinkled the surface of the pool, rattled the awning of the concession stand. Underwater, Harriet enjoyed having something heavy to fight and kick against, enjoyed the white Frankenstein arcs of electricity leaping—as from some great generator—against the walls of the pool. Suspended there—in chains and spangles of radiance, ten feet above the bellying curve of the deep end—sometimes she forgot herself for whole minutes at a time, lost in echoes and silence, ladders of blue light.

For long dreamy spells, she lay in a dead man’s float, staring down at her own shadow. Houdini had escaped fairly quickly in his underwater tricks and while the policemen glanced at their watches, and tugged at their collars, while his assistant shouted for the axe and his wife screamed and
slumped in a make-believe faint, he was usually well out of his restraints and—out of view—floating quite calmly beneath the surface of the water.

Towards this, at least, Harriet had progressed over the summer. She could hold her breath comfortably for well over a minute and—if she stayed very still—she could grit it out (not so comfortably) for nearly two. Sometimes she counted the seconds but more often she forgot: what enthralled her was the process, the trance. Her shadow—ten feet below—wavered dark across the floor of the deep end, as big as the shadow of a grown man.
The boat’s sunk
, she told herself—imagining herself shipwrecked, adrift in blood-warm immensities. Oddly, it was a comfortable thought.
No one’s coming to rescue me
.

She’d been floating for ages—scarcely moving, except to breathe—when, very faintly, she heard someone calling her name. With a breaststroke and a kick, she surfaced: to heat, glare, the noisy hum of the cooling unit outside the clubhouse. Through foggy eyes, she saw Pemberton (who hadn’t been on duty when she’d arrived) wave from atop his lifeguard chair and then jump down into the water.