The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  Edith—with a white cocktail apron over her black dress—spotted Mrs. Fountain, laid down her tray of biscuits and came over. “Why Grace. Thank you for stopping by.” She wore heavy black eyeglasses—men’s glasses, like those that Mrs. Fountain’s deceased husband, Porter, used to wear; not very flattering, thought Mrs. Fountain, for a lady; she was also drinking, from a kitchen tumbler wrapped at the bottom with a damp Christmas napkin, what appeared to be whiskey with ice.

  Mrs. Fountain—unable to restrain herself—remarked: “Looks like you’re celebrating, having all this big party over here after the funeral.”

  “Well, you can’t just lay down and die,” snapped Edie. “Go over and get yourself some hors d’oeuvres while they’re hot, why don’t you.”

  Mrs. Fountain, thrown into confusion, stood very still and allowed her gaze to wander unfocused over distant objects. At last she replied, vaguely: “Thank you,” and walked stiffly to the buffet table.

  Edie put her cold glass to her temple. Before this day, Edie had been tipsy less than half a dozen times in her life—and all of those times before she was thirty, and in vastly more cheerful circumstances.

  “Edith, dear, can I help you with anything?” A woman from the Baptist church—short, round in the face, a good-natured little fluster in her manner like Winnie the Pooh—and, for the life of her, Edith couldn’t recall her name.

  “No, thank you!” she said, patting the lady on the back as she moved through the crowd. The pain in her ribs was breathtaking, but in a strange way she was grateful of it because it helped her concentrate—upon the guests, and the guest book, and the clean glasses; upon the hot hors d’oeuvres, and the replenishment of the cracker tray, and the regular addition of fresh ginger ale to the punch bowl; and these worries in turn distracted her from Libby’s death, which had not yet sunk in. In the past few days—a hectic grotesque blur of doctors, flowers, morticians, papers to be signed and people arriving from out of town—she had not shed a tear; she had devoted herself to the get-together after the funeral (the silver to be polished, the punch cups to be hauled down jingling from the attic, and washed) partly for the sake of the out-of-town guests, some of whom hadn’t seen one another in years. Naturally, no matter how sad the occasion, everyone wanted a chance to catch up; and Edie was grateful for a reason to keep moving, and smiling, and re-filling the compotes of candied almonds. The night before, she had tied her hair in a white rag and hurried around with dust-pan and furniture polish and carpet sweeper: fluffing cushions, cleaning mirrors, moving furniture and shaking rugs and scrubbing floors until after midnight. She arranged the flowers; she re-arranged the plates in her china cabinet. Then she had gone into her spotless kitchen and run a big sink of soapy water and—hands trembling from fatigue—washed punch cup after dusty, delicate, punch cup: a hundred punch cups in all; and when, at three in the morning, she finally climbed into bed, she had slept the sleep of the blessed.

  Libby’s little pink-nosed cat, Blossom—the newest addition to the household—had retreated in terror to Edie’s bedroom, where she was crouching under the bed. On top of bookcase and china cabinet perched Edie’s own cats, all five of them, Dot and Salambo, Rhamses and Hannibal and Slim: sitting well apart, switching their tails and glaring down at the proceedings with witchy yellow eyes. Generally, Edie enjoyed guests no more than the cats did, but this day she was grateful for the multitudes: a distraction from her own family, whose behavior was unsatisfactory, more irritant than comfort. She was tired of them all—Addie especially, swanning around with horrible old Mr. Sumner—Mr. Sumner the smooth talker, the flirt, Mr. Sumner whom their father the Judge had despised. And there she was, touching his sleeve and batting her eyes at him, as she sipped punch she had not helped to make from cups she had not helped to wash; Addie, who had not come out to sit with Libby a single afternoon while she was in the hospital because she was afraid of missing her nap. She was tired of Charlotte, too, who had not come to the hospital either, because she was too busy lying in the bed with whatever imaginary vapors plagued her; she was tired of Tatty—who had come to the hospital, plenty, but only to deliver unwelcome scenarios of how Edith might have avoided the car accident, and reacted better to Allison’s incoherent phone call; she was tired of the children, and their extravagant weeping at funeral parlor and gravesite. Out back on the porch they still sat, carrying on just as they had done over the dead cat: no difference, thought Edie bitterly, no difference in the world. Equally distasteful were the crocodile tears of Cousin Delle, who hadn’t visited Libby in years. “It’s like losing Mother again,” Tatty had said; but Libby had been both mother and sister to Edie. More than this: she was the only person in the world, male or female, living or dead, whose opinion had ever mattered to Edie one jot.

  Upon two of these lyre-back dining chairs—old friends in disaster, crowding around the walls of this little room—their mother’s casket had been laid, in Tribulation’s murky downstairs parlor more than sixty years ago. A circuit preacher—Church of God, not even Baptist—had read from the Bible: a psalm, something to do with gold and onyx, except he had read onyx as “oinks.” A family joke thereafter: “oinks.” Poor teen-aged Libby, wan and thin in an old black tea dress of their mother’s pinned at the hem and bosom; her china-pale face (naturally without color, as blonde girls were in those days before suntans and rouge) drained by sleeplessness and grief to a sick, dry chalk. What Edie remembered best was how her own hand, in Libby’s, felt moist and hot; how she’d stared the whole time at the preacher’s feet; though he’d attempted to catch Edie’s eye she was too shy to look him in the face and over half a century later she still saw the cracks in the leather of his lace-up shoes, the rusty slash of sunlight falling across the cuffs of his black trousers.

  The death of her father—the Judge—had been one of those passings that everyone called A Blessing: and that funeral oddly jolly, with lots of old red-faced “compatriots” (as the Judge and his friends called one another, all his fishing pals and Bar Association cronies) standing with their backs to the fireplace in Tribulation’s downstairs parlor, drinking whiskey and swapping stories about “Old Bully” in his youth and boyhood. “Old Bully,” that was their nickname for him. And scarcely six months later, little Robin—which she could not bear to think of, even now, that tiny coffin, scarcely five feet long; how had she ever got through that day? Shot full of Compazine … a grief so strong that it hit her like nausea, like food poisoning … vomiting up black tea and boiled custard.…

  She glanced up from her fog, and was badly unnerved to see a small Robin-like shape in tennis shoes and cut-off jeans creeping down her hallway: the Hull boy, she realized after a stunned moment or two, Harriet’s friend. Who in the world had let him in? Edie slipped into the hallway and stole up behind him. When she grabbed his shoulder, he jumped and screamed—a small, wheezing, terrified scream—and cowered from her as a mouse from an owl.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Harriet—I was—”

  “I’m not Harriet. Harriet’s my grand-daughter,” said Edie, and crossed her arms and watched him with the sportive relish at his discomfort which had made Hely despise her.

  Hely tried again. “I—I—”

  “Go on, spit it out.”

  “Is she here?”

  “Yes she’s here. Now run along home.” She grabbed his shoulders and turned him, manually, towards the door.

  The boy shrugged free. “Is she going back to camp?”

  “This isn’t play-time,” snapped Edie. The boy’s mother—a flirtatious little sass since childhood—had not bothered to show up for Libby’s funeral, had not sent flowers or even called. “Run tell your mother not to let you bother folks when there’s been a death in the house. Now scat!” she cried, as he still stood gaping at her.

  She stood watching at the door as he went down the steps and—taking his time about it—mooched around the corner and out of sight. Then she went to the kitchen, retrieved the whiskey bottle from the
cabinet under the sink and freshened her toddy, and walked back to the living room to check on her guests. The crowd was thinning. Charlotte (who was very rumpled, and damp-looking, and pink in the face, as if from strenuous exertion) stood at her post by the punch bowl smiling, with a dazed expression, at pug-faced Mrs. Chaffin from the florist’s, who chattered to her companionably between sips of punch. “Here’s my advice,” she was saying—or shouting, for Mrs. Chaffin like many deaf people tended to raise her own voice instead of asking other people to raise theirs. “Fill the nest. It’s terrible to lose a child, but I see a lot of death in my business, and the best thing for it is to get busy and have a few more little ones.”

  Edie noted a large run in the back of her daughter’s stocking. Being in charge of the punch bowl was not a very demanding task—Harriet or Allison could have done it, and Edie would have assigned either of them the job had she not felt it inappropriate for Charlotte to stand around the reception staring tragically into space. “But I don’t know what to do,” she’d said, in a frightened little squeak, when Edie had marched her to the punch bowl and slapped the ladle in her hand.

  “Fill their cups and give them more if they want it.”

  In dismay—as if the ladle were a monkey wrench and the punch bowl a complicated piece of machinery—Charlotte glanced at her mother. Several ladies from the choir—smiling hesitantly—lingered politely by the cups and saucers.

  Edie snatched the ladle from Charlotte, dipped it, filled a cup and set it on the tablecloth, then handed the ladle back to Charlotte. Down at the end of the table, little Mrs. Teagarten (all in green, like a small, spry tree frog with her wide mouth and large, liquid eyes) turned theatrically with her freckled hand to her breast. “Gracious!” she cried. “Is that for me?”

  “Certainly!” called Edie in her brightest stage voice as the ladies—now beaming—began to migrate in their direction.

  Charlotte touched her mother’s sleeve, urgently. “But what should I say to them?”

  “Isn’t this refreshing?” said Mrs. Teagarten, loudly. “Do I taste ginger ale?”

  “I don’t reckon you have to say anything,” Edie said quietly to Charlotte, and then, in full voice, to the assembled company: “Yes, it’s just a plain little non-alcoholic punch, nothing special, just what we have at Christmas. Mary Grace! Katherine! Won’t you have something to drink?”

  “Oh, Edith …” In pressed the choir ladies. “Doesn’t this look lovely.… I don’t know how you find the time.…”

  “Edith’s such a capable hostess, she just throws it all together at a moment’s notice.” This, from Cousin Lucinda, who had just strode up, hands in the pockets of her skirt.

  “Oh, it’s easy for Edith,” Adelaide was heard to say in a thin voice, “she’s got a freezer.”

  Edie, ignoring the slight, had made the necessary introductions and slipped away, leaving Charlotte to the punch bowl. All Charlotte needed was to be told what to do, and she was fine, so long as there wasn’t independent thought or decision of any sort. Robin’s death had really been a double loss, for she’d lost Charlotte, too—her busy bright daughter, altered so tragically; ruined, really. Certainly one never got over such a blow, but it had been more than ten years. People pulled themselves together somehow, moved along. Ruefully, Edie thought back to Charlotte’s girlhood, when Charlotte had announced she wanted to be a fashion buyer for a large department store.

  Mrs. Chaffin placed her punch cup in the saucer, which was balanced in the palm of her left hand. “You know,” she was saying to Charlotte, “poinsettias can be lovely at a Christmas funeral. The church can be so dark that time of year.”

  Edie stood with her arms across her chest and watched them. As soon as she found the right moment, she meant to have a little word with Mrs. Chaffin herself. Though Dix was unable—on such short notice, so Charlotte had said—to drive down from Nashville for the funeral, the arrangement of mock-orange and Iceberg roses he’d sent (too decorative, too tasteful, feminine somehow) had caught Edie’s attention. Certainly it was more sophisticated than Mrs. Chaffin’s usual arrangements. Then, at the funeral home, she’d walked into a room where Mrs. Hatfield Keene was giving Mrs. Chaffin a hand with the flowers, only to hear Mrs. Keene say—stiffly, as if in reply to an inappropriate confidence: “Well, she might have been Dixon’s secretary.”

  Adjusting a spray of gladiolus, Mrs. Chaffin sniffed, and cocked her head shrewdly to one side. “Well. I answered the telephone, and took the order myself,” she said—stepping back to observe her handiwork—“and she sure didn’t sound like a secretary to me.”

  ————

  Hely did not go home, but merely turned the corner and circled around to the side gate of Edie’s yard, where he found Harriet sitting in Edie’s back yard glider swing. Without preamble he marched up and said: “Hey, when’d you get home?”

  He had expected his presence to cheer her immediately, and when it didn’t he was annoyed. “Did you get my letter?” he said.

  “I got it,” said Harriet. She had eaten herself half-sick on candied almonds from the buffet, and their taste lingered disagreeably in her mouth. “You shouldn’t have sent it.”

  Hely sat down in the swing beside her. “I was freaked out. I—”

  With a curt nod, Harriet indicated Edie’s porch, twenty feet away, where four or five adults with punch cups stood behind the dim screen, chatting.

  Hely took a deep breath. In a quieter voice, he said: “It’s been scary here. He drives all over town. Real slow. Like he’s looking for us. I’ve been in the car with my mother, and there he is, parked by the underpass like he’s staking it out.”

  The two of them, though they were sitting side by side, were looking straight ahead, at the grown-ups on the porch, and not at each other. Harriet said: “You didn’t go back up there to get the wagon, did you?”

  “No!” said Hely, shocked. “Do you think I’m nuts? For a while, he was there every day. Lately he’s been going down to the freight yards, by the railroad tracks.”

  “Why?”

  “How should I know? A couple of days ago I got bored and went down to the warehouse, to hit some tennis balls. Then I heard a car, and it’s lucky I hid, because it was him. I’ve never been so scared. He parked his car and he sat for a while. Then he got up and walked around. Maybe he followed me, I don’t know.”

  Harriet rubbed her eyes and said: “I saw him driving that way a little while ago. Today.”

  “Towards the train tracks?”

  “Maybe. I wondered where he was going.”

  “I’m just glad he didn’t see me,” said Hely. “When he got out of his car I nearly had a heart attack. I was hiding in the bushes for about an hour.”

  “We should go over on a Special Op and see what he’s doing down there.”

  She had thought the phrase special op would be irresistible to Hely, and she was surprised by how firmly and swiftly he said: “Not me. I’m not going down there again. You don’t understand—”

  His voice had risen sharply. A grown-up on the porch turned a bland face in their direction. Harriet nudged him in the ribs.

  He looked at her, aggrieved. “But you don’t understand,” he said, in a quieter voice. “You had to see it. He would have killed me if he saw me, you could tell by the way he was looking around.” Hely imitated the expression: face distorted, eyes roving wildly over the ground.

  “Looking for what?”

  “I don’t know. I mean it, I’m not messing with him any more, Harriet, and you’d better not, either. If him or any of his brothers figure out it’s us that threw that snake, we’re dead. Didn’t you read that thing from the newspaper I sent you?”

  “I didn’t get the chance.”

  “Well, it was his grandma,” said Hely austerely. “She nearly died.”

  Edie’s garden gate creaked open. Suddenly Harriet leaped up. “Odean!” she cried. But the little black lady—in straw hat, and belted cotton dress—cut her eyes at Harriet
without turning her head and did not reply. Her lips were compressed, her face rigid. Slowly, she shuffled to the back porch and up the stairs, and rapped on the door.

  “Miz Edith here?” she said, hand to brow, peering through the screen.

  After a moment’s hesitation Harriet—stunned, cheeks burning from the snub—sat back down in the swing. Though Odean was old and grumpy, and Harriet’s relationship with her had never been very good, no one had been closer to Libby; the two of them were like an old married couple—not only in their disagreements (mostly about Libby’s cat, which Odean despised) but also in their stoic, companionable affection for one another—and Harriet’s heart had risen violently at the very sight of her.

  She had not thought of Odean since the accident. Odean had been with Libby since they were both young women, out at Tribulation. Where would she go now, what would she do? Odean was a rickety old lady, in poor health; and (as Edie often complained) not much use around the house any more.

  Confusion on the screen porch. “There,” said somebody inside, moving to make room, and Tat stepped sideways to the front. “Odean!” she said. “You know me, don’t you? Edith’s sister?”

  “Why aint nobody told me about Miss Libby?”

  “Oh, dear … Oh my. Odean.” Glance backwards, at the porch: perplexed, ashamed. “I’m so sorry. Why don’t you come inside?”

  “Mae Helen, who works for Ms. McLemore, done come and told me. Nobody come and got me. And yall already put her into the ground.”