The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett - 9

M y sister’s house was very white and very wide and very tall. Six fat columns supported a deep front porch with a dozen black rocking chairs on it. They seemed to be leaning back, arms out, as if observing me. For a long minute, they watched me watching them from dusty North Lamar Boulevard. This was the only lived-in structure for about a mile. Across the property stood tall, well-placed oak trees, each with a fancy skirt of privet. The whole situation could easily be a first cousin to the Tates’. Only larger and whiter. A larger, whiter cousin, on the even richer side of the family.

I dragged myself through an unlatched gate and up a brick path, past a carriage block chiseled with the name Tartt . I was not looking or feeling my best, nor was their yard. A limb had fallen in the azalea bushes that lined the front porch, I reckon from the storm that had just blown through here. At the time, it’d seemed wise just to walk from the train depot instead of spending twenty-five more cents on a taxicab ride. On the way, I’d gotten a glimpse of a big town square and quite a few nice houses big as this one, several with automobiles parked out front. After about ten minutes of walking, the paved road had turned to dirt and the houses had grown smaller and then into empty fields, at which time it’d started to rain. Hard. I trudged up my sister’s front steps, my good church dress stuck to my skin and my hair matted to my head. Least I’d saved my one good hat by tucking it in my bag. And while I was eager to see my sister, I was not just uncomfortable but also irritated at her all over again for not writing or calling us back, none of which made for a real good state of mind to arrive in, unannounced, especially when I really needed to use her water closet.

I set my suitcase down and tapped a heavy brass knocker on the front door. Inside, I heard a familiar laugh and thought, Thank God she’s home. A few seconds later the door swung open. And there was Frances, smiling, like she was expecting somebody else.

She stared as the fact of me set in. “Birdie?” she said, eyes wide.

For a second I thought my sister was happy to see me, and even though I was irritated, I reached out and hugged her. “Lord, it’s been too long, Frances,” I said, and she wriggled in my arms like I was hugging too hard; she always said I hugged too hard. So I turned her loose and said, “And thanks a lot for not writing us or calling us back.”

She had on a slim, navy-blue linen dress with a round white collar. A wet stain of myself was stamped on the front of her now. She’d filled out a little, but she had the same slightly pointy nose and soft, light brown curls that cupped her jawline. She was even prettier than before she left. But did I get a Do come in and let me get you a cold drink ? I did not.

“What in the world are you doing here, Bird?” was what I durn got.

“We have been writing you for a month, Frances. Mama’s worried sick. What, are you too busy to pick up your dang mail anymore?”

“No, I—” Her shoulders, clenched up around her long neck, slipped down a little. “I got your letters, I just hadn’t had the chance to read them yet.”

To her credit there was at least a trace of guilt in her voice.

“I also left a message with your help to call us. You read that one?”

“Yes, and I’m sorry. I’ve just been so busy with meetings and volunteering …” She looked back at the door as if she was afraid of what was in there and jerked it shut. “And nobody around here’ll even help me, I mean the maids act like they can’t even hear me, and Rory’s been out of town so much …” Laughter drifted from inside again.

“It’s fine,” I said. “And by the way, this is from Mama.” I handed her the now soggy pillow. “Can I come inside now? I’m soaking and these boots are rubbing holes in my feet.”

She looked down at my muddy lace-up boots, many years old. “I’ve got some real important ladies here right now, they’re on the Senior Orphan Committee, I’ve been trying to get nominated on it for months, give me this,” and she took the suitcase out of my hand and, opening the door a crack, set it and the pillow just inside the house. “Just go around back to the kitchen, it’s thataway, and I promise I’ll meet you in there in a few minutes.”

“Frances Calhoun, you are not sending your only sister to the back—” But she was already stepping inside, and the tall black door shut behind her.

I’d used a flush toilet three times now, an unusual thing to keep count of, I know, but after a lifetime of pee pots and outhouses, these were all memorable events. The first had been in Jackson at the doctor’s office when I was sixteen—a frightening, cold room where a cold nurse had shown me how to sit on the cold white seat; the second was at the Eola Hotel in Natchez a few years later. Mathilda Tate’d gone there for her birthday, so Frances had begged to go for hers, the ticket for iced tea and strawberry cake almost killing Daddy before the heart attack did. And the third time was the dank little water closet off Frances’s back porch.

By its bare pine walls, I assumed this one was for the yardman who, by the looks of things, must be on vacation. Though the front yard didn’t look too terrible, for some reason, the backyard looked almost abandoned. Bermuda grass was grown up to my shins, littered with tall weeds and bursts of angry red thistle and leaves and branches from what looked like a month or two of storms.

When I came out, a tiny Negro woman, maybe in her fifties, in a white uniform was watching me through a screen door.

“Hello there,” I said, “I hope you don’t mind, I went ahead and helped myself to the water closet.”

A good foot shorter than me, she stood with her arms crossed, a white paper hat fastened to the top of her dark hair. Through the screen she eyed my crooked wet dress, my bare feet. I’d already tugged my boots off and peeled off my wet stockings.

“We ain’t handing out no plates, now you need to move on.”

“ Picador. ” Another Negro woman, tall and thin and younger, was coming at her and she pushed and held open the screen door. “Sorry, ma’am,” she said. “Miss Frances just now tole me you was coming round back.”

“Nobody tell me she coming,” the tiny woman said as I passed her. “Fo all I know she a hobo looking for a free plate. Ain’t even got no shoes on.”

“Sorry, I got caught in the storm,” I said. “I’m Birdie, Frances’s sister.”

“I’m Polly,” the tall, younger one said. “This my sister, Picador.”

There was probably a decade between them. I withheld a comment about our both having such welcoming sisters.

It was a large, square kitchen with black-and-white-tiled floors, separated down the middle by a counter with a sink in it. I motioned to it. “If you don’t mind, I’m gonna wash up in here a little. I don’t think Frances wants me traipsing through the house in wet clothes.”

I washed my hands and wiped my face with the clean white dish towel Polly held out to me. I still felt disgusting. Polly showed me to a round oak table on the other side of the sink counter, where she brought me a glass of sweet tea and finger sandwiches, a name I’d always found disturbing. When I took a bite, I discovered it was a very good ham salad.

The kitchen was bright and yellow with a high ceiling. Little Picador could barely reach the sink, standing behind the counter. On that side of the kitchen, the cooking side, was an even mix of old-fashioned appliances—a grandfatherly wooden icebox with compartments, an impressive-sized sooty black stove—and what the big Jackson newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger, advertised as things “for the modern-day woman.” All manner of shiny chrome appliances sat on the counters, plugged into the wall or up into the light fixtures on the ceiling. When I squinted, I saw they all bore names in a braggy silver script: El Grillo , El Perco , El Eggo , El Chafo . The El , I put together, stood for electric.

I waited, exhausted. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, before Frances came in.

“They’re finally gone. I got in here soon as I could.” She sat down next to me at the table and sighed as if she were the one who’d traveled six hours to get to her kitchen. “It’s good to see you, Birdie,” she said and gave me a side hug, though if I had to rank it, it was of the haven’t-seen-you-in-a-few-days variety hug, not the haven’t-seen-you-in-over-a-year. But it still beat the hug she hadn’t given me back when I’d hugged her at the front door.

“You look good, Franny,” I said. She was wearing red lipstick and pearl earrings I’d never seen. A copper pin on her dress said Lafayette County Orphan Asylum and, under that, Junior Committee Member . “Looks like you put a little weight on,” I added, which was about the nicest compliment you could get in Footely.

I guess not here. She flattened her lips. “I’m trying to reduce, but it’s just about impossible with all the luncheons and things I’ve got to attend.”

“Oh Footely too, so many luncheons. Me and Meemaw, we stay booked.”

She rolled her eyes. Rarely did Frances think I was funny.

“How’s Meemaw feeling?” she asked.

“Ornery,” I said, and pulled the damp, now stiffening dress away from my chest. “She put her electric prod pole in my bag in case the train got held up. I found it in Water Valley.”

She almost laughed but changed her mind. “She’s still cutting your hair, I see.” She flicked a dark lock from out behind my ear. “What about Mama? And I know , I need to write her back.”

“She’s worried about you, Frances. Along with a few other things.” I wasn’t looking forward to admitting our embarrassing circumstances, especially to somebody who wouldn’t even read our letters. “I told her I’d come check on you and we could celebrate your birthday.”

She smiled. It was fierce. “But my birthday’s not for another three weeks,” she said, her words like tight little bubbles popping in the air.

I smiled back and let her squirm over that a second. I’d be staying only as long as it took to get this sorted out. “I meant, we could celebrate it early.”

Frances picked up one of my uneaten sandwiches but put it back down. Raising her neck up, she said over the sink counter, “Picador, you and Polly go on and start cleaning up the table now. I don’t want the house a mess all day.”

Polly murmured, “Yessum,” and went out the swinging door, but Picador kept right on with drying a blue-and-white gravy dish, getting in every crevice and seam, then pulled a stool over and, standing up on her tippy-toes, placed it high in a cupboard. Only then did she dry her hands one last time and stroll out, opening the swinging door wide so it went flap flap flap . My sister’s mouth pinched. It was marvelous to watch.

“Don’t get me wrong, Birdie. I really do miss all y’all down in Footely.”

“Mmm, I’m pretty sure you would’ve read our letters if that was true.”

“What I’m saying is, if you’re planning on staying awhile, there some things you need to understand.”

“Fine, understand me then. And then I want to change out of these clothes.” My dress felt like sandpaper on my chafed skin.

“It’s not like it was back home, here. Things are—they’re different for me now, Bird. The Tartts are respected people, they have stature. And they’ve been places, to Europe and Africa. Rory’s daddy was a very well-known businessman. He started one of the biggest banks in Oxford.” She batted her long lashes as if waiting on a congratulations from me, and what did she expect me to say, Good job ? You must’ve worked very hard to marry a man whose daddy worked very hard ?

“Believe me, Franny, we’re all very happy you married somebody with money,” I said. “You have no idea how happy we are.” I wiped a splatter of mud off the lap of my dress with my napkin. “Though I’m still waiting on Daddy’s coffin to explode because you married a banker.”

“I can’t help it if Rory’s family is so important,” she said, and while she might not’ve been too happy to see me, she sure was happy to have somebody to say that to. “That’s why you can’t just show up here out of the blue looking like we’re poor country hicks or something.”

“We are not poor ,” I said. Actually, we were now. But before this year, I would never have called us poor .

Frances laughed at this without laughing; it was more of a snort. “Oh yes we are. Compared to the Tartts, we most certainly are poor. His mama treats me like I come from Podunk, Mississippi.”

“Well, if the shoe fits, Franny.”

“You have no idea how hard I’ve worked, Bird, to make a good impression here, and get invited to the right luncheons and join committees so the Tartts won’t think I’m just some common country trash—” She started blinking, her neck stretching and growing. Lord, I thought she’d outgrown that. “It’s not easy to get as far as I’ve gotten and I won’t have you waltz in here barefooted in that homemade dress and ruirn it all for me.”

“Calm down, Goose, you’re getting your feathers ruffled. I’m not here to ruirn anything for you.”

“That right there,” she said, poking a finger at me, “that’s what I’m talking about. It’ll be just like when you drew that goose picture, you ruirned it for me then and you’re gonna ruirn it for me now—I mean ruin ! See what you do to me?”

“Franny, that goose picture was ten dang years ago.”

“I told you. Do not. Call me. Goose ,” she said, her neck grown tall and taut. Couldn’t she understand, the effect was the cause? “I am not that goose person anymore and nobody here knows a thing about that goose-calling.”

“Alright, I’m sorry. I will not call you … that. Anymore.”

Thank goodness her long, straining neck settled back into place. “All I’m saying is I’ve worked very hard to improve myself, Bird, and I just—I want to be the wife Rory wants me to be. Can you understand that?”

No. But I said, “I guess.” She talked like she was a thing in a catalogue, that she could change out for a different size or shape. “But you need to remember where you come from, Frances, because you do come from Podunk, Mississippi, and your mama and meemaw and sister still live there.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” she said, folding her hands prim in her lap. “To be honest, Rory likes that I’m a small-town Delta girl. He thinks a wife should be ladylike, not one of those girls who discusses politics and newspapers and has all sorts of noisy opinions.”

“I can’t wait to meet him,” I said.

“He’s down in Jackson today, seeing to some important clients, but he’ll be home around supper.”

I nodded but there was something else that’d been stuck in my craw for a year now, that I was ready to finally get out. “Why didn’t you invite us to your wedding, Franny?”

She set her hands on the edge of the table, like she was bracing herself. She must’ve known that would crush us. “I didn’t invite anybody, alright? I wanted to, but we got married in such a hurry, I didn’t even have time to find a dress. Mrs. Tartt had to borrow one for me.”

“Why a hurry?” I asked. If I didn’t know what a gosh-darn prude Frances was, I’d think she meant she was in trouble.

“It was some legal thing, taxes or something, it doesn’t matter. Rory wanted to hurry and so did I.”

I was pretty sure that wasn’t the whole truth, but Picador, the tiny housemaid, had come in carrying an armful of dirty linens. She toted them past us to a little washroom off the back of the kitchen, and Frances stood up. “We better get you changed before Mrs. Tartt gets home from bridge. Now look, when I introduce you, I want you to be nice.”

“I’m always nice.”

“Well she’s not, she’s a witch,” she said, checking behind her. “I keep asking Rory when we can move out of his mother’s house. She’s always lingering around the place.”

“Oh yeah, she really ought not linger in her own house,” I said.

“And for some reason I don’t think she likes me very much,” Frances said. “I don’t know why.”

“It’s a mystery,” I said and followed her out.

Frances led me up a dim, narrow staircase off the kitchen, which she called the “service stairs,” and at the top, we went down a pale carpeted hall, to a bathroom. This bathroom was something else entirely from my brief history of bathrooms. It was almost the size of my bedroom at home, tiled in a fleshy, flat pink. A rounded porcelain sink stood under an oval mirror, the toilet stool tucked, discreetly, in the far corner, and under a window sash stretched a long white tub with a pair of silver spouts curving over the side of it like the necks of swans.

Frances went over and twisted both knobs. Up on the wall, a white box started to rattle. When I reached under the taps, I felt cold and hot water pouring out at the same time, and while I was not ignorant of the hot-water tank—I read the Sears, Roebuck catalogue like anybody else when I couldn’t sleep—this would be my first warm bath without hauling fifteen pots of boiling water from the stove to the tub.

“Good Lord, no wonder you married Rory so quick,” I said when I slipped down into the velvety warmth. It wasn’t to get in the man’s bed, it was to get in his bathtub. The water felt buttery on my chafed skin and I leaned back and closed my eyes. If it felt this nice in July, it must’ve been downright delicious come January.

Next to the tub, Frances sat on a stool and stared straight ahead. She never could stand being around nakedness, not even her own. It was on almost before it was even off. I guess she peeked, though. “Oh my God, Birdie, when did you stop shaving your armpits?”

“When you abandoned us and quit fussing at me to do it. I don’t see the point of risking my life every time my underarm grows a hair.” From the medicine cabinet, she brought her nickel-silver Curvfit razor, and I soaped up my armpits and made my sister happy.

While I ran a washrag up my neck and over my face, she crossed her legs and wagged her foot. “What do you do down in Footely when you’re not working at the store?” she asked.

“I do what I’ve always done, Frances. Spread joy all the day long.”

“But what else? I mean, what do you do ?” she said and I thought, Here we go. My little life was not exciting enough for her.

“It’s pretty much the same as when you left, Franny. Get up at dawn, milk the cow, make the coffeepot, cook my world-famous eggs. After work, I make supper, you know I like to cook. Sunday is church, Tuesday nights I play bridge with the old men at the store, and Saturday nights I go back to the Foote and listen to people talk on the telephone.”

“Don’t you get lonely? Not having a boyfriend or a husband?” She sounded genuinely worried. I’d be touched if the question wasn’t so irritating.

“Hard to be lonely when you’re never alone, Frances,” I said, though this was a lie. Even with Mama and Meemaw at the house, loneliness hung like the heat. “Why, what do you do all day long?” I asked. “Besides eat finger sandwiches and order the maids around.”

“I go to luncheons and committee meetings.”

“Yeah, we covered that. What else?”

“Well, I volunteer at the orphanage three, sometimes four, days a week. Right now I’m on the junior committee, but Garnett Pittman—she’s the chairlady—said I might get on the senior committee if I play my cards right. Not a lot of people know this, but Garnett had a baby that died before it was born and she never could have another one after that.” Frances sighed. “It’s so noble how she’s dedicated her life to those poor little orphan girls.”

“She sounds like a very good person,” I said. My fingers were starting to prune and I grabbed the towel in her lap. “By the way, I’m not wearing that dress.”

Before she’d sat on the stool, she’d brought in a white dress and hung it on the back of the door. It had black trim and a shiny black belt.

“Just try it on, Birdie, it might fit.”

When I got it on, we stood side by side in the mirror. It was short, like I knew it would be. Frances was three inches shorter than me, and though neither one of us had much chest, Frances looked curvier because of that tiny little waist she had. I pulled a second blue gingham dress out of my suitcase, and she started brushing out the wrinkles with her hand. “Stop,” I said.

“But it’s wrinkled and it looks so homemade.”

“It’s better, it’s Meemaw made,” I said, pulling it out of her judgy fingers and putting it on over my petticoat. “Help me.”

When I’d buttoned myself, she pinned up one side of my damp hair back with one of her silver clips. My sister, who did beautiful embroidery work, was very good at taking something plain and making it beautiful, or in my case, slightly less plain. She looked me over, frowning down at my old saddle oxfords, but let them go. “Your eyebrows are so thick, I should pluck them.”

“That sounds fun, let’s save it till tomorrow.” As we walked out, I said, “By the way, your tub’s not draining, it must be clogged.”

“I know, I’ve asked Rory a hundred times to get it fixed.”

“I can probably fix it if you got a—”

“ No ,” she said, steering me by my shoulders. “I know you like fixing things, but that’s all I need, Rory’s mother thinking my sister’s a plumber. Now look, when you meet Mrs. Tartt, don’t talk too much and be polite and—” She stopped, her eyes begging something, but I knew she was trying to be sweet.

In the end it won, though: “Please, don’t embarrass me, Birdie.”

I didn’t have much to go on regarding Mrs. Tartt. From Frances’s letters, I assumed she was much older than our own mother of forty-seven. I pictured a graying grande dame, maybe teetering on senile, and if she was worried about anything, it probably wasn’t money. According to Frances, she was also “awful and rude,” which was fairly frightening considering how high Frances’s tolerance was for the awful, rich, and rude.

Upstairs, Frances led me past more bedrooms to the opposite end of the hall, where we descended a much grander staircase that flourished at the bottom. It deposited us into a long, wide hall. The “grand hall,” she said, her voice echoing. The hall ran down the center of the house with the back door on one end and the front door at the other. I noticed a lovely blue grandfather clock, curvy like a woman, up by the front door. It ticked softly, merely a suggestion of time here at Idlewilde. “That’s Swedish,” Frances said. “Mrs. Tartt’s grandmother brought it over.” As Frances gave me the rest of the tour, which she now pronounced tu-uh , she recited her tellings like she was reading something out of The World Almanac : “Idlewilde was built in 1847. Big Henry Tartt, Rory’s daddy, bought it from a poor Tartt cousin using money he’d made in the stock market. He was only twenty-five at the time.”

On the left side of the grand hall was the “formal” sitting room, with a thick wine-colored carpet and heavy, dark furniture, brocade settees. Practically every inch of the room had been swagged in green, mauve, and blue satin, framing the windows and even some of the walls.

“It’s a miracle Idlewilde managed to survive the Civil War,” Frances went on. “The Yankee soldiers declared it too pretty to burn.” Right , I thought, must’ve been those Yankees who served on the decorations committee. “And this is the dining room.” From the sitting room, Frances parted a set of enormous pocket doors as if she were parting seas. Silver service glinted in glass cabinets along the walls. A long, dark table down the center had sixteen straight-backed chairs around it, though tonight it was set for only three. “Those chairs there are authentic Chippendolls—I mean dales . Chippen dales ,” she scolded herself.

“It’s very nice,” I said. “Very … angular.” I had no idea what the appropriate thing was to say. Standing beside the long, unpronounceable table, beneath the twelve-foot ceilings, I thought my sister looked small, unusually insignificant.

After that, she showed me rooms with names that didn’t have anything to do with what she did in them. Such as, “This is the library, where we sit and read.” My sister didn’t read books. She read picture show magazines, Good Housekeeping , and nickel romances. “That’s Rory’s study in there, and this is the smoking room,” pointing to another pair of rooms off the right-hand side of the hall. Frances didn’t smoke either—Mama’d said it was bad manners for a lady (so Meemaw’d promptly taught me how to roll my own when I was fifteen). The only rooms true to their task were the bedrooms and dressing rooms upstairs. I’d put money that was where Frances spent most of her time. You’d never seen somebody get so dressed up to go to sleep as Frances. The most amazing thing about the house to me, though, was it felt fairly cool, even with all the velvet swag and mahogany, even on a hot July afternoon.

“How big a farm is this?” I asked, gazing out a back window. On past the overgrown grass, beyond a privacy border of crape myrtles, stretched empty fields that, like the Delta, looked like they were cropping weeds this year instead of cotton or corn. If Rory was a “gentleman farmer,” in it for a little extra, not to get by on, I wondered if he was the kind of man who’d kick his sharecroppers off the land like the sad folks I’d seen from the train.

“Rory’s not a farmer, he’s a banker. He sold all those fields off years ago.”

“I take it he’s not a yardman either.” Not only did the backyard grass need cutting, a vegetable garden alongside a black barn sure looked like it could use a weeding.

“Whatever you do, do not bring up the state of the yard,” Frances said. “It’s a sensitive subject. The Tartts are town folks. All our food is store-bought except for the chickens because Rory likes a fresh egg in the morning. And that old milk cow I wish we could get rid of. She’s been mooing all the time.”

“You milking her enough?” I asked. “Cows don’t just moo for their own entertainment.”

“ Hush , I don’t know a thing about milking cows,” she said and walked on. Frances had milked a cow every dang day for eighteen years.

As we went back into the wide center hall, I said, “Oh look. There’s the telephone you didn’t call us back on.” Tucked under the big staircase was a black telephone on a table with a little wooden chair built into it.

“It’s a private line, they’re real expensive. Most everybody in town is on a party.”

I reached for the talker to see if it was as heavy as the one at the Foote, and her hand shot out.

“ No. Rory’s fussy about people using it, it’ll run up the bill.”

At the far end of the hall, near the back door, Frances set her hand on my arm. “Alright. It’s time to meet her. Now listen, I want you to Be. Have,” she said in two words like that.

“What do you think I’m gonna do, Frances?” She didn’t answer that. I followed her into the last room on the left.

“And in here is the parlor, where we like to relax,” Frances said as if I were a fancy guest now. It was a modest-sized room that ran along the back left of the house with a wall of windows that faced the back porch. It had a lovely worn green carpet, overstuffed blue chairs. I saw no unpronounceable furniture in here. And on a salmon-pink sofa, a not-quite-plump little blond-haired lady sat listening to Bing Crosby do “At Your Command” on a radio set sitting in the windowsill.

“Mrs. Tartt,” Frances said. She nearly bowed to her. “We’ve had an unexpected visitor. I’d like you to meet my sister, Birdie.”

The little lady’s wide blue eyes widened even more. “Well I declare. It’s so nice to meet you, Birdie. Picador mentioned you had a visitor, Frances.” She had a round friendly face, deep dimples set in both sides. Wearing a pale blue suit, she had gobs of jewelry on: a gargantuan pearl necklace, a gold pin inscribed with Flower Club, Sustainer , and dangling sapphires that pulled down on her lobes. When I bent to shake her white hand, it was weighty with rings on four fingers.

“Sit, sit please,” she said. Frances made a motion so I sat in the far fat blue chair on Mrs. Tartt’s right, and Frances sat in the one on her left. “Now tell me, Birdie, what brings you to Oxford to visit?”

“She’s here to celebrate my birthday … early,” Frances said. “She’s staying here with us.” A pause. “If that’s alright with you.”

“Of course, she may stay in my house as long as she likes,” Mrs. Tartt said, and I saw a little twitch in Frances’s jaw. She was doing what I called her “scary smile,” a square thing she locked on when she had to be nice to somebody she didn’t particularly like. I’d been treated to it myself several times. “We’ll put her in the gold room, next to you and Rory, Frances.”

As she spoke, I caught her giving my dress and deflated oxfords a good once-over. The look was actually more curious than rude, and I wondered if the maids had warned her I wasn’t up to snuff. To be fair, I was looking her over too. Her skin was surprisingly smooth, her hair a perfect golden arc around her face, nothing like the old witch Frances had prepared me for.

“Hard to believe it’s almost been a year since Frances and Rory got married and here I still haven’t met any of her people yet,” Mrs. Tartt said.

“I agree,” I said and smiled at Frances over the coffee table.

“Let’s see, now I know y’all live down in the Delta,” Mrs. Tartt said. “Tell me, did you get to the spring pilgrimage this year down in Natchez? I heard it was wonderful.”

Frances’s eyes drilled through me, so what I said was, “Unfortunately, I missed the pilgrimage this year.” That was a tour of grand old antebellum homes where ladies in hoop skirts and men in Confederate uniforms asked the Negroes to kindly pretend they were slaves again. When The Delta Dispatch printed a two-page spread on it, I wrote to inform them, THAT IS NOT NEWS.

“I’d love to go see the tour sometime, ” Mrs. Tartt said. “And how are your cousins the Tates doing these days? I reckon I haven’t spoken to Emmogene Tate in, oh it’s probably been ten years.”

Cousins? I scary smiled back at Frances, wanting dearly to laugh, because how had I forgotten? Frances’s little problem with telling white lies. She was good at it, though they were never more than details, ornamental but deceptive like those innocent silky ribbons Mathilda Tate wore in her hair.

Slick as an eel, Frances said, “The Cousin Tates are traveling the European continent this summer, so we haven’t heard from them in a while.”

Behind Mrs. Tartt, the sun was setting, turning the room a softer, gauzy pink. It really was a good room. The fireplace had a fiddlehead fern inside it, though whatever’d been hanging over the mantel was gone now, leaving a block of darker paint. In the corner was a Victor Victrola with a big red horn sticking out, but I knew Frances wouldn’t want me to admit I’d never seen one other than in the catalogue. But when I saw a photograph on the side table, next to an empty glass of something, I couldn’t help myself.

“Is that Theodore Roosevelt?” I picked up the frame from a cluster of others.

“Is it?” Frances asked. Even she looked surprised.

“Yes,” Mrs. Tartt said. “Did y’all know Teddy?”

Frances barely shook her head, as if not personally knowing a president of the United States might be some kind of a strike against her. I said, “I did not know President Roosevelt, no, ma’am.”

Mrs. Tartt leaned up and pointed over the pink sofa arm. “Next to Teddy that’s Henry, my late husband.” Beside the president was a huge, broad-chested man in a tuxedo holding a cigar. “That photograph was taken right out there in the backyard.” Her voice turned soft and smoky. “We used to have all sorts of balls and big occasions back there. Henry loved a party, any excuse would do.” Beyond the huge men, under a banner that read Happy New Year 1917 , partygoers wore long gowns and suits, some posing with a foot out, tipping their top hats. A dance floor was laid out right on the lawn, the grass trimmed and the bushes tidy, the crape myrtles a foot shorter. I glanced at the backyard behind Mrs. Tartt’s head. The photograph looked nothing like it did now.

“Course we don’t do those kinds of things nowadays,” Mrs. Tartt said. “Rory says it wouldn’t look right, with so many folks having a hard time. What about down in the Delta, y’all still throwing big parties and soirees?”

“No, ma’am,” I said.

Before setting the photograph back on the table, I spotted a younger, daintier Mrs. Tartt in a long gown, gloves up past her elbows. She’d grown a few sizes wider in the hips these past sixteen years, but otherwise, she looked about the same. There was something about this that made my heart hurt a little.

“How old are you, Mrs. Tartt? If you don’t mind my asking?”

“ Birdie , don’t ask her that—” Frances said.

“It’s alright,” Mrs. Tartt said. “I’ll be sixty-two come December.”

I studied her face and Frances groaned. She was almost fifteen years older than our mother, and she didn’t even have bags under her eyes. She had some crow’s-feet in the corners, strands of silver in her blond hair, but she just looked so unexhausted in a way Mama and Footely folks did not, and I wondered if this was how almost sixty-two was supposed to look if you hadn’t worried yourself sick over the price of canned peaches. I didn’t dislike her for it, I just wondered.

“You look almost the same as you did in 1917,” I told her.

“ Thank you, dear ,” she said and touched the fat pearls at her collarbone. She said it so genuinely, I thought she’d been wishing somebody would say that to her for years.

“It’s getting late, don’t you think?” Frances asked.

“Heavens to Betsy, it is,” Mrs. Tartt said and tinkled a small silver bell on the picture table. It was sugary sounding. It made me hungry. Meemaw used to ring a cowbell and holler, “Git your rear ends in the house!”

Back in the grand hall and into the golden-lit dining room, we sat down to supper. Frances and I sat across from Mrs. Tartt with an empty place at the head set for Rory. Picador, the tiny older maid, stood waiting with a perspiring silver pitcher. “Want you some ice, ma’am?” she asked after she poured water into my glass.

“Please,” I said, and with silver tongs, she clasped two cubes from a bowl on the table and dropped them in my water glass. Now that is luxury. Ice in your water that you didn’t have to stand over the sink and chop yourself.

Next, Picador set platters and bowls of food on the table: slices of a rare roast beef, white rice, brown peppery gravy in a silver boat, field peas with ham hocks, sliced tomatoes, and a bowl of mayonnaise with a spoon that looked like a seashell. I was starving. Frances’s elbow informed me that I was putting too much food on my plate.

After a soft-spoken blessing from Mrs. Tartt, she said, “This looks just wonderful, Picador, thank you. And I’m sorry to keep you so late tonight.”

“Polly gone but I don’t mine, I wait fo Mr. Rory to get home.” Last, Picador set a glass of something milky in front of Mrs. Tartt. “I put you a little sugar in there.” She waited, watching Mrs. Tartt drink it down.

“I don’t like it,” Mrs. Tartt said and wiped the film off her lips with her napkin.

“Dr. Speed say you got to drink it, but it sho don’t look good.”

“Picador’s been with us going on twenty-six years now,” Mrs. Tartt said to me. “The year Rory was born. I don’t know what we’d do without her.”

“Skip your medicine’s what you’d do,” she said, and Mrs. Tartt chuckled.

As we ate, summer light slid down the wall and I saw Mrs. Tartt frown at the window behind me. “I hope you’ll excuse the state of our yard, Birdie, but Rory let Mr. Jake, our yardman, go. He says it’s only temporary. Rory pushed the mower himself out front but the back is still a mess.” She did not sound happy about any of this.

“Rory told me he’d take care of the backyard this weekend,” Frances said and then, my way, “It looks bad to have too much help when so many can’t afford anything.”

Mystery solved, I guess, though I didn’t point out that this Mr. Jake probably couldn’t afford anything now either.

“Tell me about Rory,” I asked, cutting my rare roast beef. All I knew thus far was he didn’t like opinions .

Mrs. Tartt smiled. “He’s a wonderful son.”

“And husband,” Frances said, touching her napkin to the corner of her mouth. “And he works so hard. He’s been going down to Jackson a few times a week to meet with a new client.”

“No one’s prouder of him than his mother,” Mrs. Tartt said.

“Except for his wife,” Frances said, the scary smile already locking in on her lips.

“I know you’re proud of him, dear,” Mrs. Tartt said, “but it’s just different when it’s your child. Maybe you’ll know about that one day.”

That shut Frances up, but all this adoration told me nothing.

By coffee and caramel cake, I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, though the grandfather clock only chimed seven thirty. Mrs. Tartt covered a deep yawn. “I know I ought to go to bed.”

“Can I go too?” I asked Frances.

“Go,” Frances said to Mrs. Tartt. “Me and Birdie’ll wait up for Rory.”

“Well, I just drank all that coffee,” Mrs. Tartt said, “so I might as well wait on him too.”

Another half hour of small talk passed before the back door closed and the china rattled in the glass cases. “There he is. Rory, we’re in here ,” Mrs. Tartt called.

“ We’re at the table ,” Frances said a hair louder, and in Rory came carrying a briefcase.

He was only a few inches taller than me. I was five foot five. He wore a blue seersucker suit and a red tie tied tight around his neck. His hair, dark blond, was oiled and combed back, and he was sweating a little. His face was round like his mother’s and pleasant, boyish. He wasn’t bad looking, there was just less of him than I’d expected, especially after seeing the photograph of his moose of a daddy.

“Hello, dear,” Mrs. Tartt said and turned her cheek up to him, but he went and pecked Frances’s.

“Darling, I’d like you to meet my sister, Birdie. She came as a surprise for my birthday coming up.”

I’d heard some pressure on that word birthday and maybe he did too because it took him a split second to smile. My Lord, he had white teeth. “It’s very nice to meet you,” he said and came over to shake my hand. His was soft. He had his mother’s dimples, and in fact, he’d be her spitting image if he went to the beauty parlor and put on a Flower Club, Sustainer pin.

Frances had gotten up and pulled his chair out at the head of the table and was forking roast beef onto a plate. I passed the peas, and Mrs. Tartt reached up and snuck a dab of mayonnaise on it with the shiny shell spoon.

Rory backed away from us all a few steps. “Thank you, but I’m really not hungry—”

“You’ve got to eat something, son, it’s not good for you not to eat,” Mrs. Tartt said and added a tomato to the plate.

“I had a late lunch. I just want to change out of this suit and then I need to work in my study. My client wants to see some numbers in the morning.”

“But you just got home.” Frances stood there holding the plate. “And I was hoping we could talk about my birthday next month.”

Still holding his briefcase in one hand, he frowned and eased back another step. He looked trapped by three women all trying to feed him and get answers out of him. I knew the feeling. Soon as I got home from the store, Mama always wanted to hear about every person who’d come in and what for, when all I wanted to do was sit down and have a nice quiet argument with The Delta Dispatch .

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he really sounded like he was. “But I have to get these numbers together, dear.”

“It’s alright,” Frances said and set the plate down. “I understand.” She went and kissed his cheek, and he said good night and left.