“Well … I–I suppose because—”
“It might hit a house, mightn’t it? I mean, it might shoot down and hit us?”
“Why should it?” She is brushing past me as if I were not there. She must not do that.
“Mamalie. …” I feel along the wall. “Where are you going, Mamalie?” She does not answer. She is like that. Sometimes she does not answer, she does not look up when she is knitting, she even sits without her knitting and is not asleep, but “Don’t disturb your grandmother,” Mama will say. It is not just because she is getting a little deaf in one ear, but we know which ear that is and stand on the side of her “good ear,” as she calls it. But she is hearing something all the same; you can see that she is hearing something. Maybe she is hearing something now in the dark. I have forgotten about the shooting star. Maybe she will let me stay in her room. If I stay in her room with her, I might hear something.
She is feeling for the matches in her top bureau drawer. She has her lace caps there and handkerchiefs in sachet, and there is cologne on the top of her bureau.
“They’re in the left corner, at the back,” I prompt her, “you told me to remind you if you forgot.” She hides the matches in different corners, as if she were afraid of them. But she has found the matches. She strikes a match, and there is a little flame from the candle in a saucer; she keeps a saucer and the candle standing on the top of her bureau. She will put the saucer on a chair by her bed. It is a night light, and she will even ask me sometimes to pour water in the saucer from her pitcher on the washstand, and then we have to pour some out again, because it is too much for the candle, and then we get it just right, so that the candle will go out and not set anything on fire if it starts to sputter. She even carries a candle in the train, in her handbag, in case, she says, “the lights should all go out in a tunnel.”
“But do they?”
“Do they what, Aggie?” Now she is calling me “Aggie.” I wonder if she will notice, she never calls me “Aggie,” but why shouldn’t she call me “Aggie” if she calls me “Helen” or “Laura” even? Now I am Aggie; this is the first time I have been Aggie. I stand in my nightdress and see the room, and it is a different room and I am Aggie. It is summer I know, but I do not hear their voices because Mamalie’s room is this side of the house, away from the front steps and the grass where we have the new little magnolia tree planted.
She will never unpin her cap because she has a little bald spot on the top of her head, she says, but now she unpins her cap. I see Mamalie without her cap and she looks just the same, only maybe not so old because the light is not very bright and her hair is not all-over white but partly white, and where it is not white you can see that it is black, but very black, not like Mama’s, or mousy as they call mine.
Her eyes slant up at the sides, yes, you can see now that she looks like Aunt Aggie, only Aunt Aggie is a taller lady, taller than Mama even. It seems that it is cold, though it is a hot summer night, but there is wind this side of the house because the curtains blow a little in the wind, and I can see that Mamalie is afraid they’ll brush against the candle in the saucer, even before she says, “The curtains, Aggie.”
I go over and jerk the summer curtains; they are made of flowered stuff, like the curtains they pinned up for the window they cut out of an old screen that they stood up for a house in a garden when I was My garden is under the window. It was that kind of window curtain, and this had little daisies and wild roses running along and little yellow flowers in the corner that Mama said were English primroses and grow wild in England, but we had not seen them, only the ones that grow bunched on a stem that the Williamses had in their garden, that Mrs. Williams called “primulas” and that Mamalie called “keys-of-heaven.”
It is better to get in her bed. It is not cold, but the quilt she always brings with her in her trunk is pretty; it is made of patches of everybody’s best dresses and some French stuff that was sent by one of the old-girls from New Orleans. Mamalie can tell me about the dresses; I will want to ask her again about this black one with the tiny pink rosebuds, that was one of Aunt Aggie’s to go to Philadelphia in, when she married Uncle Will. I can pull up the quilt and I can sit here and I am not afraid now to think about the shooting star because I think she is going to talk about the shooting star in a different way that isn’t gravitation.
She said, “I forgot all about it.”
I don’t know if that is the shooting star or the question I am thinking of asking her (because sometimes she seems to know what I am going to ask her and answers me beforehand) about Aunt Aggie’s black silk dress with rosebuds, but she has not forgotten about that because she was telling me about it only the other day when I helped her unpack. She will stay as long as she can, but then she must get back to Bethlehem; it will be for one of those things, like putting flowers on Papalie’s grave for his birthday or the day he died on, but she seems to like to be with us here and goes in the kitchen and makes Papa apple pies. Now she has pulled out the bone hairpins that she wears at the top, to keep up her braids. She has two braids, and they hang down now, either side of her face, and she might almost be a big girl or a little girl sitting in the low chair with the candle on the window sill.
“I would have told you before but I forgot, Agnes.”
I say, “Yes, Mimmie,” because Mama and Aunt Aggie call her “Mimmie.” I am afraid she will remember that I am only Hilda, so I crouch down under the cover so she will only half see me, so that she won’t remember that I am only Hilda.
“It wasn’t that I was afraid,” she said, “though I was afraid. It wasn’t only that they might burn us all up, but there were the papers. Christian had left the secret with me. I was afraid the secret would be lost.”
I do not know who Christian is and I am afraid to ask. Or does she mean a Christian? It is the same name as Hans Christian Andersen. I get tired of hearing them talk about the picture someone called Benjamin West painted of a lady called Mary Ann Wood (I think her name was) and the spinet that the fan-maker in London gave to someone; anyhow their grandfather had a spinet in his house, even if it wasn’t that one, and that would be Mamalie’s papa, why yes, that would be Mamalie’s own papa, and perhaps Mamalie played the spinet, though she never plays the piano.
Now it seems that I can understand why they are so interested in Mary Ann Wood and what she had, because all at once I understand about the spinet, and I even wonder about the fan-maker in London and who he was and who he made fans for and what the fans were like and why did he give the spinet away and did they bring it with them on the same boat or did they send it on another boat and what was the name of the ship they came on, anyway?
For the first time in my life, I wonder who we all are? Why, Mamalie’s own Mama was called Mary and she was from Virginia, and her father and mother had come straight from Scotland, and I did not even know their names nor the name of the ship they came on. Mamalie’s own mama’s name was Mary, and is that why (I wonder for the first time) Mamalie always gets Uncle Fred to sing The Four Marys the last thing after Thanksgiving or Christmas parties?
I never thought about who they were very much, and anyhow I could always find out by asking them, but now for the first time I really want to know; I want to know who Christian is, because somehow Christian is not one of the ones Mama and Uncle Hartley and Cousin Ed talk about, but Christian is someone I just hear about, alone with Mamalie, as if Christian belonged alone to me and Mamalie, and didn’t she say, anyhow, there was a secret?