by Donna Tartt
————
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.
Harriet ducked to avoid the splash, and then—seized inexplicably by panic—somersaulted underwater and swam for the shallow end but he was too quick, and cut her off.
“Hey!” he said as she surfaced, with a grand shake of his head that sent the spray flying. “You got good while you were at camp! How long can you hold your breath? Seriously,” he said, when Harriet didn’t answer. “Let’s time you. I’ve got a stopwatch.”
Harriet felt her face growing red.
“Come on. Why don’t you want to?”
Harriet didn’t know. Down below on the blue bottom her feet—barred with pale blue breathing tiger stripes—looked very white and twice as fat as usual.
“Suit yourself.” Pem stood up for a minute, to push his hair back, and then settled back down in the water so their heads were on the same level. “Don’t you get bored, just laying there in the water? Chris gets a little pissed off.”
“Chris?” said Harriet, after a startled pause. The sound of her own voice startled her even more: it was all dry and rusty, like she hadn’t spoken for days.
“When I came to relieve him he was all like: ‘Look at that kid, laying in the water like a log.’ Those toddler moms kept bugging him about it, like he would just let some dead kid float in the pool all afternoon.” He laughed, and then, when he couldn’t catch Harriet’s eye, he swam to the other side.
“Do you want a Coke?” he said; and there was a cheerful crack in his voice that reminded her of Hely. “Free? Chris left me the key to the cooler.”
“No thanks.”
“Say, why didn’t you tell me Allison was home when I called the other day?”
Harriet looked at him—blankly, a look that made Pemberton’s brow pucker—and then hopped along the bottom of the pool and began to swim away. It was true: she’d told him that Allison wasn’t there, and hung up, even though Allison was in the next room. Moreover: she didn’t know why she’d done it, couldn’t even invent a reason.
He hopped after her; she could hear him splashing. Why won’t he leave me alone? she thought despairingly.
“Hey,” she heard him call. “I heard Ida Rhew quit.” The next thing she knew, he had glided in front of her.
“Say,” he said—and then did a double take. “Are you crying?”
Harriet dove—kicking a healthy spray of water in his face—and darted off underwater: whoosh. The shallow end was hot, like bathtub water.
“Harriet?” she heard him call as she surfaced by the ladder. In a grim hurry, she clambered out and—head down—scurried for the dressing room with a string of black footprints winding behind her.
“Hey!” he called. “Don’t be like that. You can play dead all you want. Harriet?” he called again as she ran behind the concrete barrier and into the ladies’ locker room, her ears burning.
————
The only thing that gave Harriet a sense of purpose was the idea of Danny Ratliff. The thought of him itched at her. Again and again—perversely, as if bearing down on a rotten tooth—she tested herself by thinking of him; and again and again outrage flared with sick predictability, fireworks sputtering from a raw nerve.
In her bedroom, in the fading light, she lay on the carpet, staring at the flimsy black-and-white photograph she’d scissored from the yearbook. Its casual, off-centered quality—which had shocked her at first—had long since burned away and now what she saw when she looked at the picture was not a boy or even a person, but the frank embodiment of evil. His face had grown so poisonous to her that now she wouldn’t even touch the photograph except to pick it up by the edges. The despair of her house was the work of his hand. He deserved to die.
Throwing the snake on his grandmother had given her no relief. It was him she wanted. She’d caught a glimpse of his face outside the funeral home, and of one thing she was now confident: he recognized her. Their eyes had met, and locked—and his bloodshot gaze had flashed up so fierce and strange at the sight of her that the memory made her heart pound. Some weird clarity had flared between them, a recognition of some sort, and though Harriet wasn’t sure what it meant, she had the curious impression that she troubled Danny Ratliff’s thoughts fully as much as he troubled hers.
With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers—laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. “That’s Life.” That’s what they all said. “That’s Life, Harriet, that’s just how it is, you’ll see.”
Well: Harriet would not see. She was young still, and the chains had not yet grown tight around her ankles. For years, she’d lived in terror of turning nine—Robin was nine when he died—but her ninth birthday had come and gone and now she wasn’t afraid of anything. Whatever was to be done, she would do it. She would strike now—while she still could, before her nerve broke and her spirit failed her—with nothing to sustain her but her own gigantic solitude.
She turned her attention to the problem at hand. Why would Danny Ratliff go to the freight yards? There wasn’t much to steal. Most of the warehouses were boarded up and Harriet had climbed up and looked inside the windows of the ones that weren’t: empty, for the most part, except for raggedy cotton bales and age-blacked machinery and dusty pesticide tanks wallowing belly-up in the c
orners. Wild possibilities ran through her mind: prisoners sealed in a boxcar. Bodies buried; burlap sacks of stolen bills. Skeletons, murder weapons, secret meetings.
The only way to find out exactly what he was doing, she decided, was to go down to the freight yards and see for herself.
————
She hadn’t talked to Hely in ages. Because he was the only seventh grader at the Band Clinic, he now thought he was too good to associate with Harriet. Never mind that he’d only been invited because the brass section was short on trombones. The last time she and Hely had spoken—by telephone, and she had called him—he’d talked of nothing but band, volunteering gossip about the big kids as if he actually knew them, referring to the drum majorette and the hot-shot brass soloists by first name. In a chatty but remote tone—as if she were a teacher, or a friend of his parents—he informed her of the many, many technical details of the half-time number they were working on: a Beatles medley, which the band would conclude by playing “Yellow Submarine” while forming a gigantic submarine (its propeller represented by a twirled baton) on the football field. Harriet listened in silence. She was silent, too, at Hely’s vague but enthusiastic interjections about how “crazy” the kids in the high-school band were. “The football players don’t have any fun. They have to get up and run laps while it’s still dark, Coach Cogwell screams at them all the time, it’s like the National Guards or something. But Chuck, and Frank, and Rusty, and the sophomores in the trumpet section … they are so much wilder than any of the guys on the football team.”
“Hmmn.”
“All they do is talk back and crack crazy jokes and they wear their sunglasses all day long. Mr. Wooburn’s cool, he doesn’t care. Like yesterday—wait, wait,” he said to Harriet, and then to some peevish voice in the background: “What?”
Conversation. Harriet waited. After a moment or two Hely returned.
“Sorry. I have to go practice,” he said virtuously. “Dad says I need to practice every day because my new trombone is worth a lot of money.”
