by Donna Tartt
————
The odor of lily and tuberose, overpowering in the hot funeral parlor, made Harriet’s stomach flutter queasily whenever the fan revolved and blew a draft of it in her direction. In her best Sunday dress—the white dress with daisies—she sat dim-eyed on a scroll-backed settee. The carvings poked her between the shoulderbones; her dress was too tight in the bodice—which only increased the tightness in her chest and the suffocating stuffiness of the air, the sensation of breathing an outer-space atmosphere not oxygen, but some empty gas. She had eaten no supper or breakfast; for much of the night, she had lain awake with her face pressed in the pillow and cried; and when—head throbbing—she opened her eyes late the next morning to her own bedroom, she lay quietly for several lightheaded moments, marveling at the familiar objects (the curtains, the leaf-reflections in the dresser mirror, even the same pile of overdue library books on the floor). Everything was as she had left it, the day she went away to camp—and then it fell on her like a heavy stone that Ida was gone, and Libby was dead, and everything was terrible and wrong.
Edie—dressed in black, with a high collar of pearls; how commanding she looked, by the pedestal with the guest book!—stood by the door. She was saying the exact same thing to every person who came into the room. “The casket’s in the back room,” she said, by way of greeting, to a red-faced man in musty brown who clasped her hand; and then—over his shoulder, to skinny Mrs. Fawcett, who had tipped up decorously behind to wait her turn—“The casket’s in the back room. The body’s not on view, I’m afraid, but it wasn’t my decision.”
For a moment Mrs. Fawcett looked confused; then she, too, took Edie’s hand. She looked like she was about to cry. “I was so sorry to hear,” she said. “We all loved Miss Cleve down at the library. It was the saddest thing this morning when I came in and saw the books I’d put aside for her.”
Mrs. Fawcett! thought Harriet, with a despairing rush of affection. In the crowd of dark suits, she was a comforting spot of color in her print summer dress and her red canvas espadrilles; she looked like she’d come straight from work.
Edie patted her hand. “Well, she was crazy about you all down at the library, too,” she said; and Harriet was sickened by her hard, cordial tone.
Adelaide and Tat, by the settee opposite Harriet’s, were chatting with a pair of stout older ladies who looked like sisters. They were talking about the flowers in the funeral chapel, which—through negligence on the part of the funeral home—had been allowed to wilt overnight. At this, the stout ladies cried aloud with dismay.
“Looks like the maids or something would have watered them!” exclaimed the larger and jollier of the two: apple-cheeked, rotund, with curly white hair like Mrs. Santa.
“Oh,” said Adelaide coolly, with a toss of her chin, “they couldn’t take the trouble to do that,” and Harriet was pierced by an unbearable stab of hatred—for Addie, for Edie, for all the old ladies—at their brisk expertise in the protocol of sorrow.
Right beside Harriet stood another blithe group of chatting ladies. Harriet didn’t know any of them except Mrs. Wilder Whitfield, the church organist. A moment before they had been laughing out loud as if they were at a card party, but now they had put their heads together and settled in to talking in hushed voices. “Olivia Vanderpool,” murmured a bland, smooth-faced woman, “well, Olivia lingered for years. At the end she was seventy-five pounds and couldn’t take solid food.”
“Poor Olivia. She was never the same after that second fall.”
“They say bone cancer is the worst.”
“Absolutely. All I can say is that it’s a blessing little Miss Cleve slipped away so quickly. Since she didn’t have anybody.”
Didn’t have anybody? thought Harriet. Libby? Mrs. Whitfield noticed Harriet glaring at her, and smiled; but Harriet turned her face away and stared at the carpet with red, brimming eyes. She’d cried so much since the ride home from camp that she felt numb, nauseated: unable to swallow. The night before, when she finally fell asleep, she’d dreamed about insects: a furious black swarm pouring out of an oven in someone’s house.
“Who’s that child belong to?” the smooth-faced woman asked Mrs. Whitfield, in a stage whisper.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Whitfield; and her voice dropped. In the dimness, light from the hurricane lanterns splashed and winked through Harriet’s tears; everything a haze now, all melting. Part of her—cold, furious—stood apart and mocked herself for crying as the candle-flames dissolved and leapt up in wicked prisms.
The funeral home—on Main Street, near the Baptist church—was in a tall Victorian house that bristled with turrets and spiky iron crest-work. How many times had Harriet ridden her bicycle by, wondering what went on up in those turrets, behind the cupolas and hooded windows? Occasionally—at night, after a death—a mysterious light wavered in the highest tower behind the stained glass, a light which made her think of an article about mummies she’d seen in an old National Geographic. Embalmer-priests labored long into the night, read the caption beneath the picture (Karnak after dark, a spooky light burning) to prepare their Pharaohs for the long voyage into the underworld. Whenever the tower light burned, Harriet felt a chill down the backbone, pedalled a little faster towards home, or—in early winter darks, on the way home from choir practice—pulled her coat close about her and nestled down in the back seat of Edie’s car:
Ding dong the castle bell
sang the girls, jumping rope on the church lawn after choir,
Farewell to my mother
Lay me in the boneyard
Beside my oldest brother …
Whatever nocturnal rites took place upstairs—whatever slashing and draining and stuffing of loved ones—the downstairs was sunk in a sedative Victorian creepiness. In the parlors and reception rooms, the proportions were grand and shadowy; the carpet thick and rusty; the furniture (spool-turned chairs, obsolete love-seats) dingy and stiff. A velvet rope barred the bottom of the staircase: red carpet, retiring gradually into horror-film darkness.
The mortician was a cordial little man named Mr. Makepeace with long arms and a long thin delicate nose and a leg that dragged from polio. He was cheerful and talkative, well-liked despite his job. Across the room, he limped from group to conversational group, a deformed dignitary, shaking hands, always smiling, always welcomed: people stepping to the side, ushering him decorously into conversations. His distinctive silhouette, the angle of the dragged leg and his habit (every so often) of seizing his thigh with both hands and wrenching it forward when his bad leg got stuck: all this made Harriet think of a picture she’d seen in one of Hely’s horror comics, of the hunched manor-house servant wrenching his leg—forcibly, with both hands—from the skeletal grip of a fiend reaching up to seize it from below.
All morning Edie had been talking about “what a good job” Mr. Makepeace had done. She’d wanted to go ahead and have an open-coffin funeral even though Libby had repeated urgently all her life that she didn’t want her body viewed after she was dead. In life, Edie had scoffed at these fears; in death, she’d disregarded Libby’s wishes and chosen both coffin and clothing with an eye to display: because the out-of-town relatives would expect it, because it was the custom, the thing to do. But this morning, Adelaide and Tatty had raised such a hysterical fuss in the back room of the funeral home that finally Edie had snapped “Oh, for Heaven’s sake” and told Mr. Makepeace to shut the lid.
Beneath the strong perfume of the lilies, Harriet noticed a different smell. It was a chemical smell, like mothballs, but more sickly: embalming fluid? It did not do to think about such things. It was better not to think at all. Libby had never explained to Harriet why she was so opposed to open-casket funerals, but Harriet had overheard Tatty telling someone that back when they were girls, “sometimes these country undertakers did a very poor job. Back before electric refrigeration. Our mother died in the summer, you know.”
Edie’s voice rose clear for a moment, in her place by the guest book, above
the other voices: “Well those people didn’t know Daddy then. He never bothered with any such.”
White gloves. Discreet murmurs, like a DAR meeting. The very air—musty, choking—stuck in Harriet’s lungs. Tatty—arms folded, shaking her head—was talking to a tiny little bald man that Harriet didn’t know; and despite the fact that she was dark under the eyes, and without lipstick, her manner was oddly businesslike and cold. “No,” she was saying, “no, it was old Mr. Holt le Fevre gave Daddy that nickname back when they were boys. Mr. Holt was walking down the street with his nurse-maid when he broke free and jumped on Daddy and Daddy fought back, of course, and Mr. Holt—he was three times Daddy’s size—broke down crying. ‘Why, you’re just an old bully!’ ”
“I often heard my father call the Judge that. Bully.”
“Well, it wasn’t a nickname that suited Daddy, really. He wasn’t a large man. Though he did put on weight in those last years. With the phlebitis, and his ankles swollen, he couldn’t get around like he once had.”
Harriet bit the inside of her cheek.
“When Mr. Holt was out of his mind,” Tat said, “there at the last, Violet told me that every now and then he’d clear up and ask: ‘I wonder where old Bully is? I haven’t seen old Bully for a while.’ Of course Daddy had been dead for years. There was one afternoon, he kept on so about it, fretting about Daddy and wondering why he hadn’t been by in so long that finally Violet told him: ‘Bully stopped by, Holt, and he wanted to see you. But you were asleep.’ ”
“Bless his heart,” said the bald man, who was looking over Tat’s shoulder at a couple coming into the room.
Harriet sat very, very still. Libby! she felt like screaming, screaming the way she screamed aloud for Libby even now sometimes, when she woke in the dark from a nightmare. Libby, whose eyes watered at the doctor’s office; Libby afraid of bees!
Her eyes met Allison’s—red, brimming with misery. Harriet clamped her lips shut and dug her fingernails into her palms and glared at the carpet, holding her breath with great concentration.
Five days—five days before she died—Libby had been in the hospital. A little while before the end, it had even seemed as if she might wake: mumbling in her sleep, turning the phantom pages of a book, before her words became too incoherent to understand and she slipped down into a white fog of drugs and paralysis. Her signs are failing, said the nurse who’d come in to check her that final morning, while Edie was sleeping on a cot beside her bed. There was just enough time to call Adelaide and Tat to the hospital—and then, at a little before eight, with all three of her sisters gathered around the bed, her breaths got slower and slower and “then,” said Tat, with a wry little smile, “they just stopped.” They’d had to cut her rings off, her hands were so swollen … Libby’s little hands, so papery and delicate! beloved little speckled hands, hands that folded paper boats and set them to float on the dish-basin! swollen like grapefruits, that was the phrase, the awful phrase, that Edie had repeated more than once in the past days. Swollen like grapefruits. Had to call the jewelry store to cut the rings off her fingers.…
Why didn’t you call me? said Harriet—staggered, dumbfounded—when at last she was able to speak. Her voice—in the air-conditioned chill of Edie’s new car—had squeaked up high and inappropriate beneath the black avalanche which had crushed her nearly senseless at the words Libby’s Dead.
Well, said Edie philosophically, I figured, why ruin your good time before I had to.
“Poor little girls,” said a familiar voice—Tat’s—up above them.
Allison—her face in her hands—began to sob. Harriet clenched her teeth. She’s the only one sadder than me, she thought, the only other really sad person in this room.
“Don’t cry.” Tat’s school-teacherly hand rested for a moment on Allison’s shoulder. “Libby wouldn’t want you to.”
She sounded upset—a little, noted Harriet coldly, in the small hard part of her which stood back, and watched, untouched by grief. But not upset enough. Why, thought Harriet, blind and sore and dazed from weeping, why did they leave me at that stinking camp while Libby was in the bed dying?
Edie, in the car, had apologized—sort of. We thought she was going to be all right, she’d said, at first; and then I thought you’d rather remember her the way she was and finally I wasn’t thinking.
“Girls?” Tat said. “Do you remember our cousins Delle and Lucinda from Memphis?”
Two slumpy, old-lady figures stepped forward: one tall and tan, the other round and black, with a jewelled black-velvet purse.
“I declare!” said the tall, tan one. She stood like a man, in her large, flat shoes and her hands in the pockets of her khaki shirt-waist dress.
“Bless their hearts,” murmured the little dark fat one, dabbing at her eyes (which were rimmed in black, like a silent movie star’s) with a pink tissue.
Harriet stared at them and thought about the pool at the country club: the blue light, how absolutely soundless was the world when she slipped underwater on a deep breath. You can be there now, she told herself, you can be there if you think hard enough.
“Harriet, may I borrow you for a minute?” Adelaide—who was looking very smart in her funeral black with the white collar—grasped her hand and pulled her up.
“Only if you promise to bring her right back!” said the little round lady, wagging a heavily be-ringed finger.
You can leave here. In your mind. Just go away. What was it Peter Pan said to Wendy? “Just close your eyes and think lovely thoughts.”
“Oh!” In the center of the room, Adelaide stopped dead, closed her eyes. People swept by them. Music from an invisible organ (“Nearer My God to Thee”—nothing very thrilling, but Harriet could never tell what the old ladies might find exciting) played ponderously, not far off.
“Tuberoses!” Adelaide exhaled; and the line of her nose, in profile, was so like Libby’s that Harriet’s heart squeezed disagreeably tight. “Smell that!” She caught Harriet’s hand and tugged her over to a large flower arrangement in a china urn.
The organ music was fake. In an alcove behind the pier table, Harriet spied a reel-to-reel tape recorder ticking away behind a velvet drapery.
“My favorite flower!” Adelaide urged her forward. “See, the tiny ones. Smell them, honey!”
Harriet’s stomach fluttered. The fragrance, in the overheated room, was extravagant and deathly sweet.
“Aren’t they heavenly?” Adelaide was saying. “I had these in my wedding bouquet.…”
Something flickered in front of Harriet’s eyes and everything got black around the edges. The next thing she knew, the lights were whirling and big fingers—a man’s—had grasped her elbow.
“I don’t know about fainting, but they sure do give me a headache in a closed room,” someone was saying.
“Let her have some air,” said the stranger, who was holding her up: an old man, unusually tall, with white hair and bushy black eyebrows. Despite the heat, he was wearing a V-necked sweater vest over his shirt and tie.
Out of nowhere, Edie swooped down—all in black, like the Wicked Witch—and into Harriet’s face. Chill green eyes sized her up coldly for an instant or two. Then she stood up (up and up and up) and said: “Take her out to the car.”
“I’ll take her,” said Adelaide. She stepped around and took Harriet’s left arm, as the old man (who was very old, in his eighties or maybe even his nineties) took her right, and, together, they led Harriet out of doors, into the blinding sunlight: very slowly, more at the old man’s pace than Harriet’s, woozy though she felt.
“Harriet,” said Adelaide, stagily, and squeezed her hand, “I bet you don’t know who this is! This is Mr. J. Rhodes Sumner that had a place just down the road from where I grew up!”
“Chippokes,” said Mr. Sumner, inflating himself grandly.
“Certainly, Chippokes. Right down the road from Tribulation. I know you’ve heard us all talk about Mr. Sumner, Harriet, that went to Egypt with the Foreign Serv
ice?”
“I knew your aunt Addie when she was just a little baby girl.”
Adelaide laughed, flirtatiously. “Not that little. Harriet, I thought you’d like to talk to Mr. Sumner because you’re so interested in King Tut and all.”
“I wasn’t in Cairo long,” said Mr. Sumner. “Only during the war. Everybody and his brother was in Cairo then.” He shuffled up to the open passenger window of a long black Cadillac limousine—the funeral-home limo—and stooped a little to speak to the driver. “Will you look after this young lady here? She’s going to lie down in the back seat for a few minutes.”
The driver—whose face was as white as Harriet’s, though he had a gigantic rust-red Afro—started, and switched off the radio. “Wha?” he said, glancing from side to side and not knowing where to look first—at the tottery old white man leaning in his window or at Harriet, climbing into the back. “She aint feeling well?”
“Tell you what!” said Mr. Sumner, stooping down to peer into the dark interior after Harriet. “It looks like this thing might have a bar in it!”
The driver seemed to shake himself and perk up. “No sir, boss, that’s my other car!” he said, in a jokey, indulgent, artificially friendly tone.
Mr. Sumner, appreciatively, slapped the car’s roof as he laughed along with the driver. “All right!” he said. His hands were trembling; though he seemed sharp enough he was one of the oldest and frailest people Harriet had ever seen up and walking around. “All right! You’re doing all right for yourself, aint you?”
“Can’t complain.”
“Glad to hear it. Now girl,” he said to Harriet, “what do you require? Would you like a Coca-Cola?”
“Oh, John,” she heard Adelaide murmur. “She doesn’t need it.”
John! Harriet stared straight ahead.
“I just want you to know that I loved your aunt Libby better than anything in the world,” she heard Mr. Sumner say. His voice was old and quavery and very Southern. “I would have asked that girl to marry me if I’d thought she’d have me!”
