Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“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 theirPharaohs 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.