The Little Friend

All morning Edie had been talking about “what a good job” Mr. Makepeace had done. She’d wanted to go ahead and have an open-coffin funeral even though Libby had repeated urgently all her life that she didn’t want her body viewed after she was dead. In life, Edie had scoffed at these fears; in death, she’d disregarded Libby’s wishes and chosen both coffin and clothing with an eye to display: because the out-of-town relatives would expect it, because it was the custom, the thing to do. But this morning, Adelaide and Tatty had raised such a hysterical fuss in the back room of the funeral home that finally Edie had snapped “Oh, for Heaven’s sake” and told Mr. Makepeace to shut the lid.

Beneath the strong perfume of the lilies, Harriet noticed a different smell. It was a chemical smell, like mothballs, but more sickly: embalming fluid? It did not do to think about such things. It was better not to think at all. Libby had never explained to Harriet why she was so opposed to open-casket funerals, but Harriet had overheard Tatty telling someone that back when they were girls, “sometimes these country undertakers did a very poor job. Back before electric refrigeration. Our mother died in the summer, you know.”

Edie’s voice rose clear for a moment, in her place by the guest book, above the other voices: “Well those people didn’t know Daddy then. He never bothered with any such.”

White gloves. Discreet murmurs, like a DAR meeting. The very air—musty, choking—stuck in Harriet’s lungs. Tatty—arms folded, shaking her head—was talking to a tiny little bald man that Harriet didn’t know; and despite the fact that she was dark under the eyes, and without lipstick, her manner was oddly businesslike and cold. “No,” she was saying, “no, it was old Mr. Holt le Fevre gave Daddy that nickname back when they were boys. Mr. Holt was walking down the street with his nurse-maid when he broke free and jumped on Daddy and Daddy fought back, of course, and Mr. Holt—he was three times Daddy’s size—broke down crying. ‘Why, you’re just an old bully!’ ”

“I often heard my father call the Judge that. Bully.”

“Well, it wasn’t a nickname that suited Daddy, really. He wasn’t a large man. Though he did put on weight in those last years. With the phlebitis, and his ankles swollen, he couldn’t get around like he once had.”

Harriet bit the inside of her cheek.

“When Mr. Holt was out of his mind,” Tat said, “there at the last, Violet told me that every now and then he’d clear up and ask: ‘I wonder where old Bully is? I haven’t seen old Bully for a while.’ Of course Daddy had been dead for years. There was one afternoon, he kept on so about it, fretting about Daddy and wondering why he hadn’t been by in so long that finally Violet told him: ‘Bully stopped by, Holt, and he wanted to see you. But you were asleep.’ ”

“Bless his heart,” said the bald man, who was looking over Tat’s shoulder at a couple coming into the room.

Harriet sat very, very still. Libby! she felt like screaming, screaming the way she screamed aloud for Libby even now sometimes, when she woke in the dark from a nightmare. Libby, whose eyes watered at the doctor’s office; Libby afraid of bees!

Her eyes met Allison’s—red, brimming with misery. Harriet clamped her lips shut and dug her fingernails into her palms and glared at the carpet, holding her breath with great concentration.

Five days—five days before she died—Libby had been in the hospital. A little while before the end, it had even seemed as if she might wake: mumbling in her sleep, turning the phantom pages of a book, before her words became too incoherent to understand and she slipped down into a white fog of drugs and paralysis. Her signs are failing, said the nurse who’d come in to check her that final morning, while Edie was sleeping on a cot beside her bed. There was just enough time to call Adelaide and Tat to the hospital—and then, at a little before eight, with all three of her sisters gathered around the bed, her breaths got slower and slower and “then,” said Tat, with a wry little smile, “they just stopped.” They’d had to cut her rings off, her hands were so swollen … Libby’s little hands, so papery and delicate! beloved little speckled hands, hands that folded paper boats and set them to float on the dish-basin! swollen like grapefruits, that was the phrase, the awful phrase, that Edie had repeated more than once in the past days. Swollen like grapefruits. Had to call the jewelry store to cut the rings off her fingers.…

Why didn’t you call me? said Harriet—staggered, dumbfounded—when at last she was able to speak. Her voice—in the air-conditioned chill of Edie’s new car—had squeaked up high and inappropriate beneath the black avalanche which had crushed her nearly senseless at the words Libby’s Dead.