Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

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.”