It was three or four days before Aunt Libby stopped crying over this. With Adelaide and the pillowcases it had been even worse. She, unlike Libby, enjoyed nursing a grudge; for two weeks she would not even speak to Edie and Tat, and coldly ignored the conciliatory cakes and pies they brought to her porch, leaving them out for neighborhood dogs to eat. Libby, stricken by the rift (in which she was blameless; she was the only sister loyal enough to keep and use Adelaide’s pillowcases, ugly as they were), dithered back and forth trying to make peace. She had very nearly succeeded when Harriet got Adelaide stirred up all over again by telling her that Edie never even unwrapped the presents Adelaide gave her, but only took off the old gift tag and put on a new one before sending them out again: to charity organizations, mostly, some of them Negro. The incident was so disastrous that now, years later, any reference to it still prompted cattiness and subtle accusations and Adelaide, at birthdays and Christmas, now made a point of buying her sisters something demonstrably prodigal—a bottle of Shalimar, say, or a nightgown from Goldsmith’s in Memphis—from which more often than not she forgot to remove the price tags. “I like a homemade gift myself,” she would be overheard explaining loudly: to the ladies at her bridge club, to Chester in the yard, over the heads of her humiliated sisters as they were in the very act of unwrapping the unwanted extravagance. “It means more. It shows thought. But all that matters to some people is how much money you’ve spent. They don’t think a gift is worth anything unless it comes from the store.”
“I like the things you make, Adelaide,” Harriet would always say. She did, too. Though she had no use for aprons, pillowcases, tea towels, she hoarded Adelaide’s garish linens and had drawers full of them in her room. It was not the linens but the designs she liked: Dutch girls, dancing coffee pots, snoozing Mexicans in sombrero hats. She coveted them to the point of stealing them out of other people’s cupboards, and she had been extremely irritated that Edie was sending the pillowcases off to charity (“Don’t be ridiculous, Harriet. What on earth can you want with that?”) when she wanted them herself.
“I know you like them, darling,” murmured Adelaide, her voice tremulous with self-pity, drooping to give Harriet a theatrical kiss as Tat and Edie exchanged looks behind her back. “Someday, when I’m gone, you may be glad you have those things.”
“That baby,” said Chester to Ida, “love to start a scrap.”
Edie, who did not much mind a scrap herself, found in her youngest granddaughter a solid competitor. Despite, or perhaps because of this, they enjoyed each other’s company and Harriet spent a good bit of time over at her grandmother’s house. Edie often complained of Harriet’s stubbornness and lack of manners, and grumbled about how she was always under foot, but though Harriet was exasperating Edie found her a more satisfying companion than Allison, who had very little to say. She liked having Harriet around, though she wouldn’t have admitted it, and missed her on the afternoons when she didn’t come.
Though the aunts loved Harriet, she was not as affectionate a child as her sister, and her pridefulness troubled them. She was too forthright. She did not at all understand reticence or diplomacy, and in this she resembled Edie more than Edie realized.
In vain, the aunts tried to teach her to be polite. “But don’t you understand, darling,” said Tat, “that if you don’t like fruitcake, it’s better to eat it anyway instead of hurting your hostess’s feelings?”
“But I don’t like fruitcake.”
“I know you don’t, Harriet. That’s why I used that example.”
“But fruitcake is horrible. I don’t know anybody that likes it. And if I tell her I like it she’s just going to keep on giving it to me.”
“Yes, dear, but that’s not the point. The point is, if somebody has gone to the trouble to cook you something, it’s good manners to eat it even if you don’t want it.”
“The Bible says not to lie.”
“That’s different. This is a white lie. The Bible’s talking about another kind of lie.”
“The Bible doesn’t say black or white lies. It just says lies.”
“Believe me, Harriet. It’s true, Jesus tells us not to lie, but that doesn’t mean we have to be rude to our hostess.”
“Jesus doesn’t say anything about our hostess. He says that lying is a sin. He says that the Devil is a liar and the prince of lies.”
“But Jesus says Love Thy Neighbor, doesn’t He?” said Libby, inspired, taking over for the now speechless Tat. “Doesn’t that mean your hostess? Your hostess is your neighbor, too.”
“That’s right,” said Tat gladly. “Not,” she hastened, “that anybody is trying to say your hostess necessarily lives next door to you. All Love Thy Neighbor means is that you should eat what you’re offered and be gracious about it.”
“I don’t see why loving my neighbor means telling him I love fruitcake. When I don’t.”
No one, not even Edie, had any idea how to respond to this grim pedantry. It could go on for hours. It didn’t matter if you talked until you were blue in the face. Even more infuriating was that Harriet’s arguments, preposterous as they were, usually had at bottom some more or less sound scriptural basis. Edie was unimpressed by this. Though she did charity and missionary work, and sang in the church choir, she did not actually believe that every word of the Bible was true any more than, in her heart, she actually believed some of her own favorite sayings: that, for example, everything that happened was always for the best or that, deep down, Negroes were exactly the same as white people. But the aunts—Libby, in particular—were troubled if they thought too much about some of the things Harriet said. Her sophisms were grounded undeniably in the Bible, yet flew in the face of common sense and everything that was right. “Maybe,” Libby said uneasily after Harriet had stumped off home to supper, “maybe the Lord doesn’t see a difference between a white lie and a wicked lie. Maybe they’re all wicked in His eyes.”
“Now, Libby.”
“Maybe it takes a little child to remind us of that.”
“I’d just as soon go to Hell,” snapped Edie—who had been absent during the earlier exchange—“as have to go around all the time letting everybody in town know exactly what I thought of them.”
“Edith!” cried all her sisters at once.
“Edith, you don’t mean that!”
“I do. And I don’t care to know what everybody in town thinks of me, either.”
“I can’t imagine what it is you’ve done, Edith,” said self-righteous Adelaide, “that makes you believe everyone thinks so badly of you.”
Odean, Libby’s maid—who pretended to be hard of hearing—listened to this stolidly as she was in the kitchen warming some creamed chicken and biscuits for the old lady’s supper. Not much exciting happened at Libby’s house, and the conversation was usually a little more heated on the days when Harriet visited.