Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“What’s Ida’s address?” Harriet asked Allison one morning. “I want to write and tell her about Libby.”

The house was hot and still; dirty laundry was heaped in great grimy swags on top of the washing machine. Allison looked up blankly from her bowl of cornflakes.

“No,” said Harriet, after a long moment of disbelief.

Allison glanced away. She had recently started wearing dark makeup on her eyes, and it gave her an evasive, uncommunicative look.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t get it! What’s wrong with you?”

“She didn’t give it to me.”

“Didn’t you ask ?”

Silence.

“Well, didn’t you? What’s the matter with you?”

“She knows where we live,” said Allison. “If she wants to write.”

“Sweetheart?” Their mother’s voice, in the next room: helpful, infuriating. “Are you looking for something?”

After a long pause, Allison—her eyes down—resumed eating. The crunch of her cornflakes was nauseatingly loud, like the magnified crunch of some leaf-eating insect on a nature program. Harriet pushed back in her chair, cast her eyes about the room in useless panic: what town had Ida said, what town exactly, what was her daughter’s married name? And would it make any difference, even if Harriet knew? In Alexandria, Ida hadn’t had a telephone. Whenever they needed to get in touch with Ida, Edie had to get in the car and drive over to Ida’s house—which wasn’t even a house, only a lopsided brown shack in a yard of packed dirt, no grass and no sidewalk, just mud. Smoke puffing from a rusty little metal stovepipe, up top, when Edie had stopped by one winter evening with Harriet in the car, bringing fruitcake and tangerines for Ida’s Christmas. The memory of Ida appearing in the doorway—surprised, in the car headlights, wiping her hands on a dirty apron—choked Harriet with a sudden, sharp grief. Ida hadn’t let them in, but the glimpse through the open door had flooded Harriet with confusion and sadness: old coffee cans, an oilcloth-covered table, the raggedy old smoky-smelling sweater—a man’s sweater—that Ida wore in the wintertime, hanging on a peg.

Harriet unfolded her fingers of her left hand and consulted, in private, the cut she’d made in the meat of her palm with a Swiss Army knife on the day after Libby’s funeral. In the suffocating misery of the quiet house, the stab wound had made her yelp aloud with surprise. The knife clattered to the floor of the bathroom. Fresh tears sprang to her eyes, which were already hot and sore from crying. Harriet wrung her hand and squeezed her lips tight as the black coins of blood dripped on the shadowy tile; around and around she looked, in the corners of the ceiling, as if expecting some help from above. The pain was a strange relief—icy and bracing, and in its harsh way it calmed her and concentrated her thoughts. By the time this stops hurting , she’d said to herself, by the time it heals, I won’t feel so bad about Libby .

And the cut was better. It didn’t hurt much any more, except when she closed her hand a certain way. A wine-colored welt of scar tissue had bubbled up in the little stab hole; it was interesting to look at, like a small blob of pink glue, and it reminded her in a good way of Lawrence of Arabia, burning himself with matches. Evidently that sort of thing built soldierly character. “The trick,” he’d said in the movie, “is not to mind that it hurts.” In the vast and ingenious scheme of suffering, as Harriet was now beginning to understand it, this was a trick well worth learning.

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 reorganized 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.