The Little Friend Read online

  Tat’s sisters did not encourage this line of inquiry, Adelaide and Libby thinking it un-Christian; Edie, merely foolish. “But if there was such a thing as Atlanta,” said Libby, her innocent brow furrowed, “why isn’t it mentioned in the Bible?”

  “Because it wasn’t built yet,” said Edie rather cruelly. “Atlanta is the capital of Georgia. Sherman burnt it in the Civil War.”

  “Oh, Edith, don’t be hateful—”

  “The Atlanteans,” said Tat, “were the ancestors of the Ancient Egyptians.”

  “Well, there you go. The Ancient Egyptians weren’t Christian,” said Adelaide. “They worshiped cats and dogs and that kind of thing.”

  “They couldn’t have been Christian, Adelaide. Christ wasn’t born yet.”

  “Maybe not, but Moses and all them at least followed the Ten Commandments. They weren’t out there worshiping cats and dogs.”

  “Atlanteans,” Tat said haughtily, over the laughter of her sisters, “Atlanteans knew many things that modern scientists would be glad to get their hands on today. Daddy knew about Atlantis and he was a good Christian man and had more education than all of us here in this room put together.”

  “Daddy,” Edie muttered, “Daddy used to get me out of bed in the night saying Kaiser Wilhelm was coming and to hide the silver down the well.”

  “Edith!”

  “Edith, that’s not right. He was sick then. After how good he was to all of us!”

  “I’m not saying Daddy wasn’t a good man, Tatty. I’m just saying I was the one who had to take care of him.”

  “Daddy always knew me,” said Adelaide eagerly—who, being the youngest, and, she believed, her father’s favorite, never missed an opportunity to remind her sisters of this. “He remembered me right up until the end. The day he died, he took my hand and he said, ‘Addie, honey, what have they done to me?’ I don’t know why in the world I was the only one he recognized. It was the funniest thing.”

  Harriet enjoyed very much looking at Tat’s books, which included not only the Atlantis volumes but more established works such as Gibbon and Ridpath’s History as well as a number of paperbacked romances set in ancient times with colored pictures of gladiators on the covers.

  “Of course, these are not historical works,” explained Tat. “They are just little light novels with historical backdrops. But they are very entertaining books, and educational, too. I used to give them to the children down at the high school to try to get them interested in Roman times. You probably couldn’t do that any more with the kind of books they all write nowadays but these are clean little novels, not the kind of trash they have now.” She ran a bony forefinger—big-knuckled with arthritis—down the row of identical spines. “H. Montgomery Storm. I think he used to write novels about the Regency period as well, under a woman’s name, but I can’t remember what it was.”

  Harriet was not at all interested in the gladiator novels. They were only love stories in Roman dress, and she disliked anything which had to do with love or romance. Her favorite of Tat’s books was a large volume called Pompeii and Herculaneum: The Forgotten Cities, illustrated with color plates.

  Tat was happy enough to look at this with Harriet, too. They sat on Tat’s velveteen sofa and turned the pages together, past delicate murals from ruined villas, past baker’s stalls preserved perfectly, bread and all, beneath fifteen feet of ash, past the faceless gray plaster casts of dead Romans still twisted in the same eloquent postures of anguish in which they had fallen, two thousand years ago, beneath the rain of cinders on the cobblestones.

  “I don’t see why those poor people didn’t have the sense to leave earlier,” said Tat. “I guess they didn’t know what a volcano was in those days. Also, I suppose it was a little like when Hurricane Camille blew in on the Gulf Coast. There were a lot of foolish people who wouldn’t leave when the city was evacuated and sat around drinking at the Buena Vista Hotel like it was some kind of a big party. Well, let me tell you, Harriet, they were three weeks picking those bodies out of the treetops after the water went down. And not one brick from the Buena Vista left on top of another brick. You wouldn’t remember the Buena Vista, darling. They had angelfish painted on the water glasses.” She turned the page. “Look. You see this cast of the little dog that died? He’s still got a biscuit in his mouth. Somewhere I read a lovely story that somebody wrote about this very dog. In the story, the dog belonged to a little Pompeiian beggar boy that it loved, and it died trying to fetch food for him so he would have something to eat on the journey out of Pompeii. Isn’t that sad? Of course, nobody knows that for sure, but it’s probably pretty close to the truth, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe the dog wanted the biscuit for itself.”

  “I doubt it. You know that food was probably the last thing on the poor thing’s mind with all those people running around screaming and ashes falling everywhere.”

  Though Tat shared Harriet’s interest in the buried city, from a human-interest perspective, she did not understand why Harriet’s fascination extended to even the lowliest and least dramatic aspects of ruin: broken utensils, drab pot shards, corroded hunks of undistinguished metal. Certainly she did not realize that Harriet’s obsession with fragments had to do with her family’s history.

  The Cleves, like most old families in Mississippi, had once been richer than they were. As with vanished Pompeii, only traces of these riches remained, and they liked to tell, among themselves, stories of their lost fortune. Some of them were true. The Yankees had indeed stolen some of the Cleves’ jewelry and silver, though not the vast treasures the sisters sighed for; Judge Cleve had come badly out of the crash of ’29; and he had made, in his senility, some disastrous investments, most notably plunging the bulk of his savings into a crackpot scheme to develop the Car of the Future, an automobile that flew. The Judge, it was discovered by his dismayed daughters after his death, was one of the defunct company’s primary stockholders.

  So the big house, which had been in the Cleve family ever since it was built, in 1809, had to be sold in a hurry to pay off the Judge’s debts. The sisters still mourned this. They had grown up there, as had the Judge himself, and the Judge’s mother and grandparents. Worse: the person they had sold it to turned right around and sold it to someone else who turned it into a retirement home and then, when the retirement home lost its license, into welfare apartments. Three years after Robin’s death, it had burned to the ground. “It survived the Civil War,” said Edie bitterly, “but the niggers still got it in the end.”

  Actually, it was Judge Cleve who had destroyed the house, not “the niggers”; he had had no repairs done on it for nearly seventy years, nor had his mother for forty years before. By the time he died the floors were rotten, the foundations were soft with termites, the entire structure was on the verge of collapse but still the sisters spoke lovingly of the hand-painted wallpaper—eggshell blue with cabbage roses—which had been sent from France; the marble mantelpieces carved with seraphim and the handstrung chandelier of Bohemian crystal, the twin staircases designed especially to accommodate mixed house-parties: one for the boys, another for the girls, and a wall dividing the upper story of the house in half, so that mischievous boys were not able to steal over to the girls’ quarters in the middle of the night. They had mostly forgotten that by the time of the Judge’s death the boys’ staircase, on the north side, had seen no parties for fifty years and was so rickety as to be unusable; that the dining room had been burned nearly hollow by the senile Judge in an accident with a paraffin lamp; that the floors sagged, that the roof leaked, that the steps to the back porch had collapsed to splinters in 1947 beneath the weight of a man from the gas company who had come to read the meter; and that the famous hand-painted wallpaper was peeling from the plaster in great mildewed scallops.

  The house, amusingly, had been called Tribulation. Judge Cleve’s grandfather had named it that because he claimed that the building of it had very nearly killed him. Nothing remained of it but the twin c
himneys and the mossy brick walk—the bricks worked in a tricky herringbone pattern—leading from the foundation down to the front steps, where five cracked tiles on the riser, in faded Delft blue, spelled the letters CLEVE.

  To Harriet, these five Dutch tiles were a more fascinating relic of a lost civilization than any dead dog with a biscuit in its mouth. To her, their fine, watery blue was the blue of wealth, of memory, of Europe, of heaven; and the Tribulation she deduced from them glowed with the phosphorescence and splendor of dream itself.

  In her mind, her dead brother moved like a prince through the rooms of this lost palace. The house had been sold when she was only six weeks old, but Robin had slid down the mahogany banisters (once, Adelaide told her, nearly crashing through the glass-front china cabinet at the bottom) and played dominoes on the Persian carpet while the marble seraphim watched over him, wings unfurled, with sly, heavy-lidded eyes. He had fallen asleep at the feet of the bear his great uncle had shot and stuffed, and he had seen the arrow, tipped with faded jay feathers, which a Natchez Indian had shot at his great-great-grandfather during a dawn raid in 1812 and which had remained embedded in the parlor wall in the very spot where it had struck.

  Apart from the Dutch tiles, few concrete artifacts of Tribulation remained. Most of the rugs and furniture, and all of the fixtures—the marble seraphim, the chandelier—had been carted off in crates marked Miscellaneous and sold to an antiques dealer in Greenwood who’d paid only half what they were worth. The famous arrow-shaft had crumbled in Edie’s hands when Edie attempted to pull it out of the wall on moving day and the tiny arrow-head had refused all efforts to be dug out of the plaster with a putty knife. And the stuffed bear, eaten by moths, went to the dust heap, where some Negro children—delighted—had rescued it, dragging it home by the legs through the mud.

  How then to reconstruct this extinct colossus? What fossils were left, what clues had she to go on? The foundation was still there, out from town a bit, she wasn’t sure exactly where, and somehow it didn’t matter; only once, on a winter afternoon long ago, had she been taken out to see it. To a small child it gave the impression of having supported a structure far larger than a house, a city almost; she had a memory of Edie (tomboyish in khaki trousers) jumping excitedly from room to room, her breath coming out white clouds, pointing out the parlor, the dining room, the library—though all this was hazy compared with the dreadful, dreadful memory of Libby in her red car coat bursting into tears, putting out her gloved hand and allowing Edie to lead her through crunchy winter woods back to the car, Harriet trailing behind.

  A scattering of lesser artifacts had been salvaged from Tribulation—linens, monogrammed dishes, a ponderous rosewood sideboard, vases, china clocks, dining room chairs, broadcast throughout her own house and the houses of her aunts: random fragments, a legbone here, a vertebra there, from which Harriet set about reconstructing the burned magnificence she had never seen. And these rescued articles beamed warmly with a serene old light all their own: the silver was heavier, the embroideries richer, the crystal more delicate and the porcelain a finer, rarer blue. But most eloquent of all were the stories passed down to her—highly decorated items which Harriet embellished even further in her resolute myth of the enchanted alcazar, the fairy chateau that never was. She possessed, to a singular and uncomfortable degree, the narrowness of vision which enabled all the Cleves to forget what they didn’t want to remember, and to exaggerate or otherwise alter what they couldn’t forget; and in restringing the skeleton of the extinct monstrosity which had been her family’s fortune, she was unaware that some of the bones had been tampered with; that others belonged to different animals entirely; that a great many of the more massive and spectacular bones were not bones at all, but plaster-of-paris forgeries. (The famous Bohemian chandelier, for instance, had not come from Bohemia at all; it was not even made of crystal; the Judge’s mother had ordered it from Montgomery Ward.) Least of all did she realize that constantly in the course of her labors she trod back and forth on certain humble, dusty fragments which, had she bothered to examine them, afforded the true—and rather disappointing—key to the entire structure. The mighty, thundering, opulent Tribulation which she had so laboriously reconstructed in her mind was not a replica of any house which had ever existed but a chimaera, a fairy tale.

  Harriet spent entire days studying the old photograph album at Edie’s house (which, a far cry from Tribulation, was a two bedroom bungalow built in the 1940s). There was thin, shy Libby, hair scraped back, looking colorless and spinsterly even at eighteen: there was something of Harriet’s mother (and of Allison) about her mouth and eyes. Next, scornful Edie—nine years old, brow like a thundercloud, her expression a small replica of her father the Judge who frowned behind her. A strange, moon-faced Tat, sprawled in a wicker chair, the blurred shadow of a kitten in her lap, unrecognizable. Baby Adelaide, who would outlive three husbands, laughing at the camera. She was the prettiest of the four and there was something about her too which reminded one of Allison but something petulant was already gathering at the corners of her mouth. On the steps of the doomed house towering behind them were the Dutch tiles reading CLEVE: only just detectable, and only then if you were looking hard, but they were the one thing in the photograph which remained unchanged.

  The photographs Harriet loved most were those with her brother in them. Edie had taken most of them; because they were so hard to look at, they’d been removed from the album and were kept separately, on a shelf in Edie’s closet inside a heart-shaped chocolate box. When Harriet stumbled upon them, when she was eight or so, it was an archaeological find equivalent to the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb.

  Edie had no idea that Harriet had found the pictures, and that they were one of the primary reasons Harriet spent so much time at her house. Harriet, equipped with a flashlight, studied them while sitting in the back of Edie’s musty-smelling closet behind the skirts of Edie’s Sunday dresses; sometimes she slipped the box inside her Barbie travelling case and carried it out to Edie’s tool shed, where Edie—glad to have Harriet out of her hair—allowed her to play undisturbed. Several times she had carried the photographs home overnight. Once, after their mother had gone to bed, she had shown them to Allison. “Look,” she said. “That’s our brother.”

  Allison, an expression of something very like fear dawning on her face, stared at the open box which Harriet had placed on her lap.

  “Go ahead. Look. You’re in some of them.”

  “I don’t want to,” said Allison, and jammed the lid on the box and shoved it back at Harriet.

  The snapshots were in color: faded Polaroids with pinked edges, sticky and torn where they’d been pulled from the album. They were smeared with fingerprints, as if someone had handled them a lot. Some of the photographs had black catalog numbers stamped on the backs because they had been used in the police investigation, and these had the most fingerprints of all.

  Harriet never tired of looking at them. The washes were too blue, unearthly; and the colors had become even stranger and more tremulous with age. The dream-lit world they provided her a glimpse of was magical, self-contained, irretrievable. There was Robin, napping with his orange kitten Weenie; clattering around on Tribulation’s grand, columned porch, sputtering with laughter, shouting at the camera; blowing bubbles with a saucer of soap and a spool. There he was, serious, in striped pyjamas; in his Cub Scout uniform—knees thrown back, pleased with himself; here he was much smaller, dressed for a kindergarten play—The Gingerbread Man—in which he had portrayed a greedy crow. The costume he’d worn was famous. Libby had spent weeks making it: a black leotard, worn with orange stockings, sewn from wrist to armpit and from armpit to top of thigh with wings of feathered black velvet. Over his nose was tied a cone of orange cardboard for a beak. It was such a beautiful costume that Robin had worn it for two Halloweens running, as had his sisters, and all these years later, Charlotte still got calls from neighborhood mothers begging to borrow it for their children.
/>   Edie had snapped a whole roll of film the night of the play: various shots of Robin running exhilarated throughout the house, arms flapping, wings billowed behind him, a stray feather or two drifting to the vast, threadbare carpet. Black wing flung around the neck of shy Libby, the blushing seamstress. With his little friends Alex (a baker, in white coat and cap) and bad Pemberton, the Gingerbread Man himself, his small face dark with rage at the indignity of his costume. Robin again, impatient, wriggling, held still by his kneeling mother as she tried to dash a comb through his hair. The playful young woman in the picture was undeniably Harriet’s mother, but a mother she had never known: airy, charming, sparkling with life.

  The pictures enchanted Harriet. More than anything, she wanted to slip out of the world she knew into their cool blue-washed clarity, where her brother was alive and the beautiful house still stood and everyone was always happy. Robin and Edie in the great, gloomy parlor, the two of them on their hands and knees playing a board game—she couldn’t tell what, some game with bright counters and a colored wheel that spun. There they were again, Robin with his back to the camera tossing Edie a fat red ball and Edie rolling her eyes comically as she dove to catch it. There he was blowing out the candles in his birthday cake—nine candles, the last birthday he would ever see—with Edie and Allison leaning over his shoulder to help him, smiling faces ablaze in the dark. Adelirium of Christmases: pine boughs and tinsel, presents spilling from beneath the tree, the sideboard twinkling with cut-glass punchbowl, with crystal dishes of candy and oranges and sugar-dusted cakes on silver platters, the fireplace seraphim garlanded with holly and everybody laughing and the chandelier blazing in the high mirrors. In the background, on the holiday table, Harriet could just make out the famous Christmas dishes: wreathed with a pattern of scarlet ribbon, jingling sleigh bells chased in gold leaf. They’d been shattered in the move—the movers had packed them badly—and nothing remained of them now but a couple of saucers and a gravy boat but there they all were in the photograph, heavenly, glorious, a complete set.