There she was, embroidering, with her tiny silver scissors hung on a pink ribbon around her neck, working the crossword or reading a biography of Madame de Pompadour, talking to her little white cat … tip tip tip, Harriet could hear her footsteps now, the particular sound of them in her size-three shoe, tip tip tip down the long hallway to answer the telephone. Libby! How glad Libby always seemed when Harriet called—even late at night—as if there were no one in the world whose voice she so wanted to hear! “Oh! It’s my darling!” she cried; “how sweet of you to call your poor old auntie …”; and the gaiety and warmth of her voice thrilled Harriet so much that (even alone, standing by the wall phone in the dark kitchen) she shut her eyes and hung her head, warmed and glowing all over, like a chimed bell. Did anyone else seem so happy to hear from Harriet? No: no one did. Now she might dial that number, dial it all she pleased, dial it every moment until the end of time and she would never hear Libby crying at the other end: My darling! my dear! No: the house was empty now, and still. Smells of cedar and vetivert in closed rooms. Soon the furniture would be gone, but for now everything was exactly as it was when Libby set out on her trip: beds made, washed teacups stacked in the dish drainer. Days sweeping through the rooms in unremarked procession. As the sun rose, the bubbled glass paperweight on Libby’s mantelpiece would glow again into life, its little gleaming life of three hours, only to sink into darkness and slumber again when the triangle of sunlight passed over it, at noon. The flower-twined carpet—vast tangled game board of Harriet’s childhood—glowed here, glowed there, with the yellow bars of light that slashed through the wooden blinds in the late afternoons. Around the walls they slid, long fingers, passing in long distorted strands across the framed photographs: Libby as a girl, thin and frightened-looking, holding Edie’s hand; stormy old Tribulation, in sepia tone, with its thundery air of vine-choked tragedy. That evening light too would fade and vanish, until there was no light at all except the cool blue half-light of the street lamps—just enough to see by—glimmering steadily until the dawn. Hatboxes; gloves neatly folded, slumbering in drawers. Clothes that would never know Libby’s touch again, hanging in dark closets. Soon they would be packed away in boxes and sent to Baptist missions in Africa and China—and soon, perhaps, some tiny Chinese lady in a painted house, under golden trees and faraway skies, would be drinking tea with the missionaries in one of Libby’s pink Sunday-school dresses. How did the world go on the way it did: people planting gardens, playing cards, going to Sunday school and sending boxes of old clothes to the China missions and speeding all the while toward a collapsed bridge gaping in the dark?
So Harriet brooded. She sat alone on the stairs, in the hall or at the kitchen table, with her head in her hands; she sat on the window seat in her bedroom and looked down at the street. Old memories scratched and pricked at her: sulks, ungratefulness, words she could never take back. Again and again she thought of the time she’d caught black beetles in the garden and stuck them into the top of a coconut cake Libby had worked all day to make. And how Libby had cried, like a little girl, cried with her face in her hands. Libby had cried, too, when Harriet got mad on her eighth birthday and told Libby she hated her present: a heart-shaped charm for her charm bracelet. “A toy! I wanted a toy!” Later, Harriet’s mother had pulled her aside and told her the charm was expensive, more than Libby could afford. Worst: the last time she’d seen Libby, the last time ever, Harriet had shrugged her hand off, run down the sidewalk without looking back. Sometimes, during the course of the listless day (dazed hours on the sofa, paging dully through the Encyclopaedia Britannica) these thoughts struck Harriet with such fresh force that she crawled in the closet and closed the door and cried, cried with her face in the taffeta skirts of her mother’s dusty old party dresses, sick with the certainty that what she felt was never going to get anything but worse.
————
School started in two weeks. Hely was at something called Band Clinic, which involved going out to the football field every day and marching back and forth in the suffocating heat. When the football team came out to practice, they all filed back into the tin-roofed shanty of a gymnasium and sat around in folding chairs practicing their instruments. Afterwards the band director built a bonfire and cooked hot dogs, or got together a softball game or an impromptu “jam session” with the bigger kids. Some nights Hely came home early; but on those nights, he said, he had to practice his trombone after supper.
