The Little Friend

Odean, Libby’s maid, who was capricious about her comings and goings, had abandoned Libby’s kitchen in the middle of rolling out some pie crust. Harriet wandered in to find the kitchen table dusted with flour and strewn with apple peels and scraps of dough. At the far end—looking tiny and frail—sat Libby, drinking a cup of weak tea, the cup outsized in her little speckled hands. She was bent over the crossword puzzle from the newspaper.

“Oh, how glad I am you’ve come, darling,” she said, without remarking Harriet’s unannounced entry and without scolding her—as Edie would have been swift to do—for going out in public with a pyjama top over her blue jeans and with black all over her hands. Absent-mindedly, she patted the seat of the chair beside her. “The Commercial Appeal has a new man on the crossword puzzles and he makes them so hard. All kinds of old French words and science and things.” She indicated some smudged squares with the blunt lead of her pencil. “

‘Metallic element.’ I know it starts with T because the Torah is certainly the first five books of Hebrew scripture but there isn’t a metal that starts with T. Is there?”

Harriet studied it for a moment. “You need another letter. Titanium has eight letters and so does Tungsten.”

“Darling, you’re so clever. I never heard of any such.”

“Here we go,” said Harriet. “Six down, ‘Referee or judge.’ That’s Umpire, so the metal must be Tungsten.”

“My goodness! They teach you children so much in school nowadays! When we were girls we didn’t learn a bit about these horrible old metals and things. It was all arithmetic and European History.”

Together, they worked on the puzzle—they were stumped on a five-letter word for Objectionable Woman beginning with S—until Odean finally came in and began to clatter pans so energetically around the kitchen that they were forced to retreat to Libby’s bedroom.

Libby, the eldest of the Cleve sisters, was the only one who had never married, though all of them (except thrice-married Adelaide) were spinsters at heart. Edie was divorced. Nobody would talk about this mysterious alliance which had produced Harriet’s mother, though Harriet was desperate to know about it, and badgered her aunts for information. But apart from a few old photographs she’d seen (weak chin, fair hair, thin smile) and certain tantalizing phrases she’d overheard (“… liked to take a drink …” “… his own worst enemy …”) all Harriet really knew about her maternal grandfather was that he’d spent time in an Alabama hospital, where he’d died a few years ago. When younger, Harriet had derived (from Heidi

) the idea that she herself could be a force for family reconciliation, if only she were taken to the hospital to see him. Had not Heidi enchanted the dour Swiss grandpapa up in the Alps, brought him “back to life”?

“Ha! I shouldn’t count on that,” said Edie, jerking quite forcefully the knotted thread on the back side of her sewing.

Tat had fared better, with a content, if uneventful, nineteen-year marriage to the owner of a lumber company—Pinkerton Lamb, known locally as Mr. Pink—who had dropped dead of an embolism at the planing mill before Harriet and Allison were born. The wide and courtly Mr. Pink (much older than Tat, a colorful figure in his puttees and Norfolk jackets) had been unable to father children; there was talk of adoption which never came to anything but Tat was unperturbed by childlessness and widowhood alike; indeed, she had nearly forgotten that she’d ever been married at all, and reacted with mild surprise when reminded of it.

Libby—the spinster—was nine years older than Edie, eleven years older than Tat, and a full seventeen years older than Adelaide. Pale, flat-chested, nearsighted even in her youth, she had never been as pretty as her younger sisters but the real reason that she had never married was that selfish old Judge Cleve—whose harried wife died in childbirth with Adelaide—had pressed her to stay home and take care of him and the three younger girls. By appealing to poor Libby’s selfless nature, and by managing to run off the few suitors that came along, he retained her at Tribulation as unpaid nursemaid, cook, and cribbage companion until he died when Libby was in her late sixties: leaving a pile of debts, and Libby virtually penniless.