The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  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.”

  “I don’t see the point in giving the Country Club ninety dollars just to use the pool,” said Edie. “You can swim in Lake de Selby all you like.”

  Harriet said nothing.

  “It’s funny. Camp’s late starting up this year. I would have thought the first session had already started.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Remind me,” said Edie, “to make a note to call down there this afternoon. I don’t know what’s wrong with those people. I wonder when the little Hull boy is going?”

  “May I be excused?”

  “You never did tell me what you’re doing today.”

  “I’m going down to the library to sign up for the reading program. I want to win it again.” Now, she thought, was not the time to explain her true goal for the summer, not with Camp de Selby hovering over the conversation.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll do fine,” Edie said, standing to take her coffee cup to the sink.

  “Do you mind if I ask you something, Edie?”

  “Depends what it is.”

  “My brother was murdered, wasn’t he?”

  Edie’s eyes slid out of focus. She set the cup down.

  “Who do you think did it?”

  Edie’s gaze wavered for a moment and then—all at once—sharpened angrily on Harriet. After an uncomfortable instant (during which Harriet practically felt the smoke rising off her, as if she was a pile of dry wood chips smoldering in a beam of light) she turned and put the cup in the sink. Her waist looked very narrow and her shoulders very angular and military in the navy blue suit.

  “Get your things,” she said, crisply, her back still turned.

  Harriet didn’t know what to say. She didn’t have any things.

  ————

  After the excruciating silence of the car ride (staring at the stitching on the upholstery, fiddling with a piece of loose foam on the armrest) Harriet didn’t especially feel like going to the library. But Edie waited stonily at the curb, and Harriet had no choice but to walk up the stairs (stiffly, conscious of being watched) and push open the glass doors.

  The library looked empty. Mrs. Fawcett was alone at the front desk going through the night’s returns and drinking a cup of coffee. She was a tiny, bird-boned woman, with short pepper-and-salt hair, veiny white arms (she wore copper bracelets, for her arthritis) and eyes that were a little too sharp and closely set, especial
ly since her nose was on the beaky side. Most kids were afraid of her: not Harriet, who loved the library and everything about it.

  “Hi, Harriet!” said Mrs. Fawcett. “Have you come in to sign up for the reading program?” She reached under her desk for a poster. “You know how this works, right?”

  She handed Harriet a map of the United States, which Harriet studied more intently than she needed to. I must not be all that upset really, she told herself, if Mrs. Fawcett can’t tell. Harriet’s feelings were not easily hurt—not by Edie, anyway, who was always flying off the handle about something—but the silent treatment in the car had unnerved her.

  “They’re doing it with an American map this year,” Mrs. Fawcett said. “For every four books you check out, you get a sticker shaped like a state to paste on your map. Would you like me to tack this up for you?”

  “Thank you, I can do it myself,” said Harriet.

  She went to the bulletin board on the back wall. The reading program had started Saturday, only day before yesterday. Seven or eight maps were up already; most were blank but one of the maps had three stamps. How could someone have read twelve books since Saturday?

  “Who,” she asked Mrs. Fawcett, returning to the desk with the four books she’d selected, “is Lasharon Odum?”

  Mrs. Fawcett leaned out from the desk and—pointing silently to the children’s room—nodded at a tiny figure with matted hair, dressed in a grubby T-shirt and pants that were too small for her. She was scrunched up in a chair, reading, her eyes wide and her breath rasping through her parched lips.

  “There she sits,” whispered Mrs. Fawcett. “Poor little thing. Every morning for the past week, she’s been waiting on the front steps when I come to open up, and she stays there quiet as a mouse until I close at six. If she’s really reading those books, and not just sitting there pretending, she reads right well for her age group.”

  “Mrs. Fawcett,” said Harriet, “will you let me back in the newspaper stacks today?”

  Mrs. Fawcett looked startled. “You can’t take those out of the library.”

  “I know. I’m doing some research.”

  Mrs. Fawcett looked at Harriet over the tops of her glasses, pleased by this adult-sounding request. “Do you know which ones you want?” she said.

  “Oh, just the local papers. Maybe the Memphis and Jackson ones, too. For—” She hesitated; she was afraid of tipping off Mrs. Fawcett by mentioning the date of Robin’s death.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Fawcett, “I’m really not supposed to let you back there, but if you’re careful I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  ————

  Harriet—going the long way, so she wouldn’t have to walk by Hely’s house; he’d asked her to go fishing with him—stopped at home to drop off the books she’d checked out. It was twelve-thirty. Allison—sleepy and flushed looking, still in pyjamas—sat alone at the dining-room table moodily eating a tomato sandwich.

  “You want tomato, Harriet?” called Ida Rhew from the kitchen. “Or you wants chicken instead?”

  “Tomato, please,” said Harriet. She sat down by her sister.

  “I’m going to the Country Club to sign up for swimming this afternoon,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

  Allison shook her head.

  “Do you want me to sign you up, too?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Weenie wouldn’t want you to act like this,” said Harriet. “He would want you to be happy, and get on with life.”

  “I’ll never be happy again,” said Allison, putting down her sandwich. Tears began to brim at the rims of her melancholy, chocolate-brown eyes. “I wish I was dead.”

  “Allison?” said Harriet.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Do you know who killed Robin?”

  Allison began to pick at the crust of her sandwich. She peeled off a strip; she rolled it into a ball between thumb and forefinger.

  “You were in the yard when it happened,” said Harriet, watching her sister closely. “I read it in the newspaper down at the library. They said you were out there the whole time.”

  “You were there, too.”

  “Yes, but I was a baby. You were four.”

  Allison peeled off another layer of crust and ate it carefully, without looking at Harriet.

  “Four is pretty old. I remember practically everything that happened to me when I was four.”

  At this point, Ida Rhew appeared with Harriet’s plate. Both girls were silent. After she went back into the kitchen, Allison said: “Please leave me alone, Harriet.”

  “You must remember something,” said Harriet, her eyes still fixed on Allison. “It’s important. Think.”

  Allison speared a tomato slice with her fork and ate it, nibbling delicately around the edges.

  “Listen. I had a dream last night.”

  Allison looked up at her, startled.

  Harriet—who had not failed to notice this leap of attention on Allison’s part—carefully recounted her dream of the night before.

  “I think it was trying to tell me something,” she said. “I think I’m supposed to try to find out who killed Robin.”

  She finished her sandwich. Allison was still looking at her. Edie—Harriet knew—was wrong in believing that Allison was stupid; it was just very difficult to tell what she was thinking and you had to be careful around her in order not to frighten her.

  “I want you to help me,” said Harriet. “Weenie would want you to help me, too. He loved Robin. He was Robin’s kitty.”

  “I can’t,” said Allison. She pushed back her chair. “I have to go. It’s time for Dark Shadows.”

  “No, wait,” said Harriet. “I want you to do something. Will you do something for me?”

  “What?”

  “Will you try to remember the dreams you have at night, and will you write them down and show me in the morning?”

  Blankly, Allison looked at her.

  “You sleep all the time. You must have dreams. Sometimes people can remember things in dreams that they can’t remember when they’re awake.”

  “Allison,” Ida called from the kitchen. “It’s time for our program.” She and Allison were obsessed with Dark Shadows. In the summertime they watched it together every day.

  “Come watch it with us,” said Allison to Harriet. “It’s been really good the last week. They’re back in the past now. It’s explaining how Barnabas got to be a vampire.”

  “You can tell me about it when I get home. I’m going to go over to the country club and sign us both up for the pool. Okay? If I sign you up, will you go swimming with me sometime?”

  “When does your camp start, anyway? Aren’t you going this summer?”

  “Come on,” said Ida Rhew, bursting through the door with her own lunch, a chicken sandwich, on a plate. The summer before, Allison had got her addicted to Dark Shadows—Ida had watched it with her, suspiciously at first—and now during the school year Ida watched it every day and sat down with Allison when she got home and told her everything that had happened.

  ————

  Lying on the cold tile floor of the bathroom with the door locked, and a fountain pen poised above her father’s checkbook, Harriet composed herself for a moment before beginning to write. She was good at forging her mother’s handwriting and even better at her father’s; but with his loping scrawl she couldn’t hesitate for an instant, once the pen touched the paper she had to rush through it, without thinking, or else it looked awkward and wrong. Edie’s hand was more elaborate: erect, old-fashioned, balletic in its extravagance, and her high masterly capitals were difficult to copy with any fluency, so that Harriet had to work slowly, pausing constantly to refer to a sample of Edie’s writing. The result was passable, but though it had fooled other people it did not fool them all the time and it had never fooled Edie.

  Harriet’s pen hovered over the blank line. The creepy theme music of Dark Shadows had just begun to waft through the closed bathroom door.
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br />   Pay to the Order of: Alexandria Country Club, she dashed out impetuously in her father’s wide, careless hand. One hundred eighty dollars. Then the big banker’s signature, the easiest part. She breathed out, a long sigh, and looked it over: fair enough. These were local checks, drawn on the town bank, so the statements went to Harriet’s house and not to Nashville; when the cancelled check came back, she would slip it out of the envelope and burn it, and no one would be the wiser. So far, since she had first been daring enough to try this trick, Harriet had appropriated over five hundred dollars (in dribs and drabs) from her father’s account. He owed it to her, she felt; were it not for the fear of blowing her system, she would happily have cleaned him out.

  “The Dufresnes,” said Aunt Tat, “are cold people. They have always been cold. I’ve never felt they were particularly cultivated, either.”

  Harriet concurred with this. Her Dufresnes uncles were all more or less like her father: deer hunters and sportsmen, loud rough talkers with black dye combed through their graying hair, aging variations on the Elvis theme with their potbellies and their elastic-sided boots. They didn’t read books; their jokes were coarse; in their manners and preoccupations, they were about one generation removed from country sorry. Only once had she met her grandmother Dufresnes: an irritable woman in pink plastic beads and stretch pantsuits, who lived in a condominium in Florida that had sliding glass doors and foil giraffes on the wallpaper. Harriet had once gone down to stay with her for a week—and nearly went insane from boredom, since Grandmother Dufresnes had no library card, and owned no books except a biography of a man who had started the Hilton chain of hotels and a paperback entitled A Texan Looks at LBJ. She had been lifted from rural poverty in Tallahatchie County by her sons, who’d bought her the condominium in a Tampa retirement community. She sent a box of grapefruit to Harriet’s house every Christmas. Otherwise they rarely heard from her.

  Though Harriet had certainly sensed the resentment that Edie and the aunts had for her father, she had no idea quite how bitter it was. He had never been an attentive husband or father, they murmured, even when Robin was alive. It was a crime how he ignored the girls. It was a crime how he ignored his wife—especially after their son had died. He had just carried on with work, as usual, hadn’t even taken any time off from the bank, and he had gone on a hunting trip to Canada hardly a month after his son was in the ground. It was hardly surprising that Charlotte’s mind wasn’t quite what it used to be, with a sorry husband like that.