The Little Friend

Adelaide and Tat, by the settee opposite Harriet’s, were chatting with a pair of stout older ladies who looked like sisters. They were talking about the flowers in the funeral chapel, which—through negligence on the part of the funeral home—had been allowed to wilt overnight. At this, the stout ladies cried aloud with dismay.

“Looks like the maids or something would have watered them!” exclaimed the larger and jollier of the two: apple-cheeked, rotund, with curly white hair like Mrs. Santa.

“Oh,” said Adelaide coolly, with a toss of her chin, “they couldn’t take the trouble to do that,” and Harriet was pierced by an unbearable stab of hatred—for Addie, for Edie, for all the old ladies—at their brisk expertise in the protocol of sorrow.

Right beside Harriet stood another blithe group of chatting ladies. Harriet didn’t know any of them except Mrs. Wilder Whitfield, the church organist. A moment before they had been laughing out loud as if they were at a card party, but now they had put their heads together and settled in to talking in hushed voices. “Olivia Vanderpool,” murmured a bland, smooth-faced woman, “well, Olivia lingered for years. At the end she was seventy-five pounds and couldn’t take solid food.”

“Poor Olivia. She was never the same after that second fall.”

“They say bone cancer is the worst.”

“Absolutely. All I can say is that it’s a blessing little Miss Cleve slipped away so quickly. Since she didn’t have anybody.”

Didn’t have anybody? thought Harriet. Libby? Mrs. Whitfield noticed Harriet glaring at her, and smiled; but Harriet turned her face away and stared at the carpet with red, brimming eyes. She’d cried so much since the ride home from camp that she felt numb, nauseated: unable to swallow. The night before, when she finally fell asleep, she’d dreamed about insects: a furious black swarm pouring out of an oven in someone’s house.

“Who’s that child belong to?” the smooth-faced woman asked Mrs. Whitfield, in a stage whisper.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Whitfield; and her voice dropped. In the dimness, light from the hurricane lanterns splashed and winked through Harriet’s tears; everything a haze now, all melting. Part of her—cold, furious—stood apart and mocked herself for crying as the candle-flames dissolved and leapt up in wicked prisms.

The funeral home—on Main Street, near the Baptist church—was in a tall Victorian house that bristled with turrets and spiky iron crest-work. How many times had Harriet ridden her bicycle by, wondering what went on up in those turrets, behind the cupolas and hooded windows? Occasionally—at night, after a death—a mysterious light wavered in the highest tower behind the stained glass, a light which made her think of an article about mummies she’d seen in an old National Geographic. Embalmer-priests labored long into the night, read the caption beneath the picture (Karnak after dark, a spooky light burning) to prepare their Pharaohs for the long voyage into the underworld. Whenever the tower light burned, Harriet felt a chill down the backbone, pedalled a little faster towards home, or—in early winter darks, on the way home from choir practice—pulled her coat close about her and nestled down in the back seat of Edie’s car:

Ding dong the castle bell

sang the girls, jumping rope on the church lawn after choir,

Farewell to my mother

Lay me in the boneyard

Beside my oldest brother …

Whatever nocturnal rites took place upstairs—whatever slashing and draining and stuffing of loved ones—the downstairs was sunk in a sedative Victorian creepiness. In the parlors and reception rooms, the proportions were grand and shadowy; the carpet thick and rusty; the furniture (spool-turned chairs, obsolete love-seats) dingy and stiff. A velvet rope barred the bottom of the staircase: red carpet, retiring gradually into horror-film darkness.

The mortician was a cordial little man named Mr. Makepeace with long arms and a long thin delicate nose and a leg that dragged from polio. He was cheerful and talkative, well-liked despite his job. Across the room, he limped from group to conversational group, a deformed dignitary, shaking hands, always smiling, always welcomed: people stepping to the side, ushering him decorously into conversations. His distinctive silhouette, the angle of the dragged leg and his habit (every so often) of seizing his thigh with both hands and wrenching it forward when his bad leg got stuck: all this made Harriet think of a picture she’d seen in one of Hely’s horror comics, of the hunched manor-house servant wrenching his leg—forcibly, with both hands—from the skeletal grip of a fiend reaching up to seize it from below.