The Little Friend

And how had he done it? He wasn’t afraid. Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him—somersaulting along the river-bed, head over heels—he would never come up from the water alive.

A training program. This was Houdini’s secret. He’d immersed himself in daily tubs of ice, swum immense distances underwater, practiced holding his breath until he could hold it for three minutes. And while the tubs of ice were impossible, the swimming and the breath-holding—this she could do.

She heard her mother and sister coming in the front door, her sister’s plaintive voice, unintelligible. Quickly she hid the notebook and ran downstairs.

————

“Don’t say Hate, honey,” said Charlotte absent-mindedly to Allison. The three of them were sitting around the dining-room table in their Sunday dresses, eating the chicken that Ida had left for their lunch.

Allison, with her hair falling in her face, sat staring at her plate, chewing a slice of lemon from her iced tea. Though she’d sawed apart her food energetically enough, and shoved it back and forth across her plate, and piled it up in unappetizing heaps (a habit of hers that drove Edie crazy), she’d eaten very little of it.

“I don’t see why Allison can’t say Hate, Mother,” said Harriet. “Hate is a perfectly good word.”

“It’s not polite.”

“It says Hate in the Bible. The Lord hateth this and the Lord hateth that. It says it practically on every page.”

“Well, don’t you say it.”

“All right, then,” Allison burst out. “I detest Mrs. Biggs.” Mrs. Biggs was Allison’s Sunday school teacher.

Charlotte, through her tranquilized fog, was mildly surprised. Allison was usually such a timid, gentle girl. Such crazy talk about hating people was more the kind of thing you expected from Harriet.

“Now, Allison,” she said. “Mrs. Biggs is a sweet old thing. And she’s a friend of your aunt Adelaide’s.”

Allison—raking her fork listlessly through her disordered plate—said: “I still hate her.”

“That’s no good reason to hate somebody, honey, just because they wouldn’t pray in Sunday school for a dead cat.”

“Why not? She made us pray that Sissy and Annabel Arnold would win the twirling contest.”

Harriet said: “Mr. Dial made us pray for that, too. It’s because their father is a deacon.”

Carefully, Allison balanced the slice of lemon on the edge of her plate. “I hope they drop one of those fire batons,” she said. “I hope the place burns down.”

“Listen, girls,” said Charlotte vaguely, in the silence that followed. Her mind—never fully engaged with the business of the cat and the church and the twirling competition—had already drifted on to something else. “Have yall been down to the Health Center yet to get your typhoid shots?”

When neither child answered, she said: “Now, I want you to be sure and remember to go down and do that first thing Monday morning. And a tetanus shot, too. Swimming in cow ponds and running around barefoot all summer long …”

She trailed off, pleasantly, then resumed eating. Harriet and Allison were silent. Neither of them had ever swum in a cow pond in her life. Their mother was thinking of her own childhood and muddling it up with the present—something she did more and more frequently these days—and neither of the girls knew quite how to respond when this happened.

————

Still in her daisy-patterned Sunday dress, which she’d had on since the morning, Harriet padded downstairs in the dark, her white ankle socks gray-soled with dirt. It was nine-thirty at night, and both her mother and Allison had been in bed for half an hour.

Allison’s somnolence—unlike her mother’s—was natural and not narcotic. She was happiest when she was asleep, with her head beneath her pillow; she longed for her bed all day, and flung herself into it as soon as it was decently dark. But Edie, who seldom slept more than six hours a night, was annoyed by all the lounging around in bed that went on at Harriet’s house. Charlotte had been on some kind of tranquilizers since Robin died, and there was no talking to her about it, but Allison was a different matter. Hypothesizing mononucleosis or encephalitis she had several times forced Allison to go to the doctor for blood tests, which came back negative. “She’s a growing teenager,” the doctor told Edie. “Teenagers need a lot of rest.”

“But sixteen hours!” said Edie, exasperated. She was well aware that the doctor didn’t believe her. She also suspected—correctly—that he was the one prescribing whatever dope that kept Charlotte so groggy all the time.