The Little Friend

“Darling, I’m tired,” said Tat; and she did sound exhausted. “Can I do something for you?”

“The house looks different.”

“Yes it does. It’s hard being over there. Yesterday I sat down at her poor little table in that kitchen full of boxes and cried and cried.”

“Tatty, I—” Harriet was crying herself.

“Listen, darling. You’re precious to think of Tatty but it’ll go faster if I’m by myself. Poor angel.” Now Tat was crying too. “We’ll do something nice when I’m finished, all right?”

Even Edie—as clear and constant as the profile stamped on a coin—had changed. She’d grown thinner since Libby died; her cheeks were sunken and she seemed smaller somehow. Harriet had hardly seen her since the funeral. Nearly every day she drove down to the square in her new car to meet with bankers or attorneys or accountants. Libby’s estate was a mess, mostly because of Judge Cleve’s bankruptcy, and his muddled attempts, at the end, to divide and conceal what remained of his assets. Much of this confusion reverberated through the tiny, tied-up inheritance he’d passed down to Libby. To make matters worse: Mr. Rixey, the old man whose car she’d hit, had filed a lawsuit against Edie, claiming “distress and mental anguish.” He would not settle; it seemed sure to mean a court case. Though Edie was tight-lipped and stoical about it, she was clearly distraught.

“Well, it was your fault, darling,” said Adelaide.

She’d had headaches, said Adelaide, since the accident; she wasn’t up to “fooling with boxes” over at Libby’s; she wasn’t herself. In the afternoons, after her nap (“Nap!” said Tat, as if she wouldn’t enjoy a nap herself) she walked down to Libby’s house and vacuumed carpets and upholstery (unnecessary) and re-organized boxes that Tatty had already packed, but mainly she worried aloud about Libby’s estate; and she provoked Tatty and Edie alike by her cordial but transparent suspicion that Edie and the lawyers were cheating her, Adelaide, out of what she called her “share.” Every night she telephoned Edie to question her, in exasperating detail, about what had happened that day at the lawyers’ office (the lawyers were too expensive, she complained, she was fearful of her “share” being “eaten up” by legal fees); also to pass along Mr. Sumner’s advice about financial matters.

“Adelaide,” cried Edie for the fifth or sixth time, “I wish you wouldn’t tell that old man our business!”

“Why not? He’s a family friend.”

“He’s no friend of mine!”

Adelaide said, with a deadly cheerfulness: “I like to feel that someone has my interests at heart.”

“I suppose you don’t think I do.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did.”

This was nothing new. Adelaide and Edie had never got along—even as children—but never had the situation between them reached such an openly rancorous point. If Libby was alive, she would have made peace between them long before relations reached this crisis; would have pled with Adelaide for patience and discretion, and—with all the usual arguments—begged Edie for forbearance (“She is the baby … never had a mother … Papa spoiled Addie so …”).

But Libby was dead. And—with no one to mediate—the rift between Edie and Adelaide grew daily colder and more profound, to the point where Harriet (who was, after all, Edie’s granddaughter) had begun to feel an uncomfortable chill in Adelaide’s company. Harriet felt the unfairness of this all the more keenly because, formerly, whenever Addie and Edie quarrelled, Harriet had tended to take Addie’s side. Edie could be a bully: Harriet knew that only too well. Now, for the first time, she was starting to understand Edie’s side of the quarrel, and exactly what Edie meant by the word “petty.”

Mr. Sumner was back at home now—in South Carolina or wherever it was that he lived—but he and Adelaide had struck up a busy little correspondence that had Adelaide humming with importance. “Camellia Street,” she’d said, as she showed Harriet the return address on one of the letters he’d sent her. “Isn’t that a lovely name? Streets around here don’t have names like that. How I would love to live on a street with such an elegant name.”

She held the envelope at arm’s length and—glasses low on her nose—surveyed it fondly. “He’s got a nice handwriting for a man too, doesn’t he?” she asked Harriet. “Neat. That’s what I’d call it, wouldn’t you? Oh, Daddy thought the world and all of Mr. Sumner.”

Harriet said nothing. According to Edie, the Judge had thought Mr. Sumner “fast and loose,” whatever that meant. And Tatty—the deciding opinion here—would say nothing about Mr. Sumner at all; but her manner suggested that she had nothing nice to say.

“I’m sure that you and Mr. Sumner would have lots of things to talk about,” Adelaide was saying. She had removed the card from the envelope and was glancing it over, front and back. “He’s very cosmopolitan. He used to live in Egypt, did you know that?”