“Did she kiss him back?”
“She didn’t look like she cared one way or another. I’d sneaked way up on them,” he said brightly. “I started to throw a night crawler in the car but Pem would’ve beat the shit out of me.”
He offered Harriet a boiled peanut from his pocket, which she refused.
“What’s the matter? It’s not poison.”
“I don’t like peanuts.”
“Good, more for me,” he said, popping the peanut into his own mouth. “Come on, go fishing with me today.”
“No thanks.”
“I found a sandbar hidden in the reeds. There’s a path that goes right down to it. You’ll love this place. It’s white sand, like Florida.”
“No.” Harriet’s father often took the same irritating tone, assuring her with confidence that she would “love” this or that thing (football, square dance music, church cookouts) she knew full well she detested.
“What’s your problem, Harriet?” It grieved Hely that she never did what he wanted to do. He wanted to walk through the narrow path in the tall grass with her, holding hands and smoking cigarettes like grown people, their bare legs all scratched and muddy. Fine rain and a fine white froth blown up around the edge of the reeds.
————
Harriet’s great-aunt Adelaide was an indefatigable housekeeper. Unlike her sisters—whose small houses were crammed to the rafters with books, curio cabinets and bric-a-brac, dress patterns and trays of nasturtiums started from seed and maidenhair ferns clawed to tatters by cats—Adelaide kept no garden, no animals, hated to cook, and had a mortal dread of what she called “clutter.” She complained that she was unable to afford a housekeeper, which infuriated Tat and Edie as Adelaide’s three monthly Social Security checks (courtesy of three dead husbands) kept Adelaide far better fixed for money than they were, but the truth was that she enjoyed cleaning (her childhood in decayed Tribulation had given her a horror of disorder) and she rarely felt happier than when she was washing curtains, ironing linens, or bustling around her bare, disinfectant-smelling little house with a dust rag and a spray can of lemon furniture polish.
Usually, when Harriet dropped by, she found Adelaide vacuuming the carpets or cleaning out her kitchen cabinets, but Adelaide was on the sofa in the living room: pearl ear-clips, her hair—rinsed tasteful ash-blond—freshly permed, her nyloned legs crossed at the ankle. She had always been the prettiest of the sisters and at sixty-five, she was the youngest, too. Unlike timid Libby, Valkyrie Edith, or nervous, scatterbrained Tat, there was an undertow of flirtatiousness about Adelaide, a roguish sparkle of the Merry Widow, and a fourth husband was not out of the question should the right man (some natty balding gent in a sports jacket, with oil wells, perhaps, or horse farms) unexpectedly present himself in Alexandria and take a shine to her.
Adelaide was poring over the June issue of Town and Country magazine, which had just arrived. She was looking now at the Weddings. “Which of these two do you reckon has the money?” she asked Harriet, showing her a photograph of a dark-haired young man with frosty, haunted eyes standing alongside a shiny-faced blonde in a bustled hoopskirt that made her look like a baby dinosaur.
“The man looks like he’s about to throw up.”
“I don’t understand what is all this business about blondes. Blondes have more fun and all that. I think that’s something people dreamed up on the television. Most natural blondes have weak features and they look washed-out and rabbity unless they take a lot of pains to fix themselves up. Look at this poor girl. Look at that one. She has a face like a sheep.”
“I wanted to talk to you about Robin,” said Harriet, who saw no use in edging gracefully up to the subject.
“What’s that you’re saying, sweet?” said Adelaide, eyeing a photograph of a charity ball. A slender young man in black tie—clear, confident, unspoilt face—was rocking back on his heels with laughter, one hand at the back of a sleek little brunette in sugar-pink ballgown and elbow gloves to match.
“Robin, Addie.”
“Oh, darling,” said Adelaide wistfully, glancing up from the handsome boy in the photograph. “If Robin was with us now he’d be knocking the girls over like skittles. Even when he was just a tiny thing … so full of fun, he’d tip over backwards sometimes with laughing so hard. He liked to sneak up behind me and throw his arms around my neck and nibble on my ear. Adorable. Like a parakeet named Billy Boy that Edith used to have when we were children.…”
Adelaide trailed away as the smile of the triumphant young Yankee caught her eye again. College sophomore, the caption said. Robin, if he was alive, would be about the same age now. She felt a flutter of indignation. What right did this F. Dudley Willard, whoever he was, have to be alive and laughing in the Plaza Hotel with an orchestra playing in the Palm Court and his glossy girl in the satin gown laughing back at him? Adelaide’s own husbands had fallen respectively to World War II, an accidentally fired bullet during hunting season, and massive coronary; she had borne two stillborn boys by the first and her daughter, with the second, had died at eighteen months, of smoke inhalation, when the chimney of the old West Third Street apartment caught fire in the middle of the night—savage blows, knee-buckling, cruel. Yet (moment by painful moment, breath by painful breath) one got through things. Now, when she thought of the stillborn twins, she remembered only their delicate and perfectly formed features, their eyes closed peacefully, as if sleeping. Of all the tragedies in her life (and she had suffered more than her share) nothing lingered and festered with quite the rankness of little Robin’s murder, a wound that never quite healed but gnawed and sickened and grew ever more corroding with time.
Harriet observed her aunt’s faraway expression; she cleared her throat. “I guess this is what I came over to ask you, Adelaide,” she said.
“I always wonder if his hair would have darkened when he got older,” said Adelaide, holding up the magazine at arm’s length to examine it over the tops of her reading glasses. “Edith’s hair was mighty red when we were little, but not as red as his. A true red. No orange about it.” Tragic, she thought. Here were these spoilt Yankee children prancing around the Plaza Hotel, while her lovely little nephew, superior in all respects, was in the ground. Robin had never even had the chance to touch a girl. With warmth, Adelaide thought of her three ardent marriages and the cloakroom kisses of her own full-handed youth.
“What I wanted to ask is if you had any idea who might have—”
“He would have grown up to break some hearts, darling. Every little Chi O and Tri Delt at Ole Miss would be fighting over who got to take him to the Debutante Assembly in Greenwood. Not that I put much stock in that debutante foolishness, all that blackballing and cliques and petty—”
Rap rap rap: a shadow at the screen door. “Addie?”
“Who’s there?” called Adelaide, starting up. “Edith?”
“Darling,” said Tattycorum, bursting in wild-eyed without even looking at Harriet, tossing her patent-leather handbag into an armchair, “darling, can you believe that rascal Roy Dial from the Chevrolet place wants to charge everybody in the Ladies’ Circle sixty dollars apiece to ride to Charleston on the church trip? On that broken-down school bus?”
“Sixty dollars?” shrieked Adelaide. “He said he was lending the bus. He said it was free.”
“He’s still saying it’s free. He says the sixty dollars is for gasoline.”