The Little Friend

Her sisters were tormented with guilt about this—as though Libby’s servitude had been their fault, not their father’s. “Disgraceful,” said Edie. “Seventeen years old, and Daddy forcing her to raise two children and a baby.” But Libby had accepted the sacrifice cheerfully, without regrets. She had adored her sulky, ungrateful old father, and she considered it a privilege to stay at home and care for her motherless siblings, whom she loved extravagantly and quite without thought for herself. For her generosity, her patience, her uncomplaining good humor, her younger sisters (who did not share her gentle nature) considered Libby as close to a saint as it was possible for a person to be. As a young woman, she’d been quite colorless and plain (though radiantly pretty when she smiled); now, at eighty-two, with her satin slippers, her pink satin bed-jackets and her angora cardigans trimmed with pink ribbon, there was something babyish and adorable about her, with her gigantic blue eyes and her silky white hair.

To step into Libby’s sheltered bedroom, with its wooden window-blinds and its walls of duck-egg blue, was like sliding into a friendly underwater kingdom. Outside, in the fierce sun, the lawns and houses and trees were blanched and hostile-looking; the glare-dazzled sidewalks made her think of the blackbird, of the bright meaningless horror that shone in its eyes. Libby’s room was a refuge from all this: from heat, dust, cruelty. The colors and textures were unchanged since Harriet’s babyhood: dull, dark floorboards, tufted chenille bedspread and dusty organza curtains, the crystal candy dish where Libby kept her hairpins. On the mantelpiece slumbered a chunky, egg-shaped paperweight of aquamarine glass—bubbled in its heart, filtering the sun like seawater—which changed throughout the day like a living creature. In the mornings, it glowed bright, hitting its most brilliant sparkle about ten o’clock, fading to a cool jade by noon. Throughout her childhood, Harriet had spent many long, contented hours ruminating on the floor, as the light in the paperweight swung high and flittered, tottered and sank, as the tiger-striped light glowed here, glowed there, on the blue-green walls. The flowery vine-patterned carpet was a game board, her own private battlefield. She had spent countless afternoons on her hands and knees, moving toy armies across those winding green paths. Over the mantel and dominating it all was the haunting old smoky photograph of Tribulation, white columns rising ghostly from black evergreens.

Together, they worked the crossword puzzle, with Harriet perched on the arm of Libby’s chintz-upholstered chair. The china clock ticked blandly on the mantel, the same cordial, comforting old tick Harriet had heard all her life; and the blue bedroom was like Heaven with its friendly smells of cats and cedarwood and dusty cloth, of vetivert root and Limes de Buras powder and some kind of purple bath salts that Libby had used for as long as Harriet could remember. All the old ladies used vetivert root, sewn into sachets, to keep the moths out of their clothes; and though the quaint mustiness of it was familiar to Harriet from infancy, there was a tickle of mystery about it still, something sad and foreign, like rotted forests or woodsmoke in autumn; it was the old, dark smell of plantation armoires, of Tribulation, of the very past.

“Last one!” said Libby. “ ‘The art of peacemaking.’ Third letter

c, and i-o-n at the end.” Tap tap tap, she counted out the spaces with her pencil.

“Conciliation”?

“Yes. Oh dear … wait. This C

is in the wrong place.”

Silently, they puzzled.

“Aha!” cried Libby. “Pacification!” Carefully, she printed in the letters with her blunt pencil. “All done,” she said happily, removing her glasses. “Thank you, Harriet.”

“You’re welcome,” said Harriet curtly; she could not help feeling a little grumpy that Libby was the one who had got the last word.

“I don’t know why I worry so much about these foolish puzzles, but I do think they help to keep my mind alert. Most days I only manage to get three-quarters of the way through.”

“Libby—”

“Let me guess what you’re thinking, dear. Why don’t we go see if Odean’s pie is out of the oven?”

“Libby, why won’t anybody tell me anything about when Robin died?”

Libby laid down the newspaper.

“Did anything strange happen right before?”

“Strange, darling? What in the world do you mean?”

“Anything …” Harriet struggled for words. “A clue.”

“I don’t know about any clue,” said Libby, after an oddly calm pause. “But if you want to hear about strange, one of the strangest things that ever happened to me in my life happened to me about three days before Robin died. Did you ever hear the story about that man’s hat I found in my bedroom?”

“Oh,” said Harriet, disappointed. She had heard the story about the hat on Libby’s bed all her life.