“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.
Chapter 9
“What a . . . warm-looking room.”
That was what I’d said last night when Frances showed me where I’d be sleeping. It
looked like a veritable torture chamber to me. The bed had a canopy roof over it and was
surrounded by heavy velvet curtains on all sides and everything was yellow: the walls, the
carpet, the bedding, the drapes—it would be like trying to sleep inside the sun. Sure enough, I
woke up at dawn just as I’d feared: hot and buttered in the sheets.
Beside the bed, a gold-braided rope hung down the wall which, Frances had said, “rang
for the maid in the kitchen,” in response to which I’d jokingly asked if rich folks were really that
lazy, whereupon she’d explained that there was a difference between rich and lazy. Something
about the “obligation to let others do for you as they’d been hired to do.” She’d said it like a
Bible verse. She looked a little deflated when she’d said the Tartts didn’t really use the ropes
anymore.
In the bedroom-sized bathroom, I washed my face and put the blue dress from last night
back on, mostly unwrinkled. When I came out, I noticed there was a breeze coming in from
under a door next to the bathroom and it wasn’t Frances’s or Mrs. Tartt’s bedroom. I opened it
and glory hallelujah. It was a sleeping porch on the corner of the house. It had two walls of
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floor-to-ceiling screens with a pair of iron cots and that promising breeze. It was dusty, it looked
like it hadn’t been used in years, but I whispered, “I will be seeing you tonight, lover.” And I
shut it back.
As I walked past their still shut bedroom doors, I noticed a door at the end of the hall near
the grand staircase, with a large brass lock drilled into it. Clearly it locked from the inside. Going
down the stairs, I wondered, Who would you lock out of your room in your own house?
The maids weren’t in yet, so I found a can of Community Coffee in the kitchen cabinet
and a silver percolator on top of the stove. The stove was a huge black beast made by an outfit
called Duparquet, Huot & Moneuse Co. It was fitted with cast iron and had four cooking
compartments inside it, instead of one like our stove in Footely. It’d been converted to gas and
had six modern cooking eyes and a grate on top. It looked explosive, warlike. I held my breath,
turned a little red gas knob on the wall and flipped on the eye and threw a match in. I scooted
back quick. A flame lit, gentle and polite as Mrs. Tartt.
While I waited for the percolator to boil, I looked around the downstairs part of the
house. Ten minutes later, I had a pretty good handle on the place. This wasn’t a house, it was a
dang suitcase. One of those big traveling trunks with compartments and shelves stuffed full of all
their things. In the grand hall, two closets were both packed right with coats and hats for all four
seasons and everything from a spring drizzle to a full-blown hurricane. The deep closet off the
dining room stored crispy linens, crystal and china, but also stacks and stacks of old magazines,
newspapers, and catalogues from the past thirty-some-odd years. One random drawer held two
shirts’ worth of buttons and a bird’s nest of thread, unused shotgun shells, playing cards,
Christmas cards, dance cards, Y&O train passes from 1919 to 1926, and a Boy Scout handbook
that looked like not a page had been turned. Meemaw’d say someone here is hiding something
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because on the surface the house looked nice and neat until you opened up a drawer. Not that the
Calhouns threw anything away either. The Tartts just had so many more things they were not
throwing away. None of it looked like it belonged to Frances.
When the coffee was ready, I took my cup out on the back porch. The morning was
bright and breezy, not too hot yet. The yard felt like a room. The back was bordered by crape
myrtle trees, to the left was a tall hedge of Ligustrum. There was an iron arch in the center you
could walk through, covered in thorny, pink roses. On the right side stood a black oily barn with
a Studebaker parked next to it. A mockingbird complained from the silver hood ornament and a
rooster crowed back at it and then a cow lowed somewhere. Two miles from town, there were
only country noises out this far.
I found the cow standing in a muddy pen behind the barn. “Poor lady.” Her udder was
bulging; maybe the yardman Rory’d fired was supposed to be milking her. There was a stool and
bucket so I sat down and milked her. It took a minute for her milk to drop, so I laid my cheek on
her flank and rubbed her belly until she sighed and let it down. If they’d let her graze, she could
probably knock that tall backyard grass out in a day.
I was whisking eggs and cream together in a bowl when I heard the screen door whine.
“She don’t even say please—”
“Morning,” I said. Picador and Polly both stopped their conversation and nodded.
“Mawning.” They were in plain white uniforms, no hats today.
“I made coffee,” I said. “Help yourself.”
Polly looked over at the stove like this made her a little nervous. “Go on and siddown in
the dining room, ma’am, we bring you breakfast in there.”
The thought of sitting at that long table alone. “I’ll fix it, I don’t mind.”
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Little Picador smiled at me, sort of. It had frost on it, hovering around thirty-two degrees.
While they set their bags down and washed their hands, I struck a match on the back of
the stove and melted butter in a pan. When it started to brown, I poured in the eggs I’d very
lightly whisked and raked the pan with a fork. Close behind me, I heard Picador whisper
something.
“Picador, give her some room,” Polly said.
Eyes on my eggs, I said, “By the way, I milked the cow, I set it in the cupboard to cool.”
When the egg was slightly firm, I banged the pan twice on the stovetop, sprinkled in the
chopped cheese I’d found in wax paper and some chives and a tomato I’d picked from the
garden; then I closed the omelet in thirds like folding a shirt and turned it onto a plate. I leaned
against the counter and took a bite. “Should’ve used more cream,” I said.
Picador, eyed me and my egg pan from a distance. “If you don’t mine my asking, who
teach you to cook? Your mama or your maid?” The question was a slow, carefully measured
recipe.
“My daddy taught me egg making, he learned it in the war. Me and Frances didn’t have
help growing up.”
Picador looked over at Polly, one eyebrow up like she’d won a bet. Polly covered her
smile with the back of her hand. I heard Frances’s voice in the dining room and I set my plate in
the sink and grabbed my coffee but before I made it to the swinging door, Polly handed me a
china cup and took the tin one away. “You using the help’s cup,” she whispered. “Watch out or
your sister gone get on you.”
***
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Frances and Rory were sitting at the dining room table, set for breakfast last night. Rory sat at the
head with Frances sort of hanging over him, on his left, like a houseplant.
“Then how about we spend a few nights in Jackson?” Frances was saying. “We could
stay at the Robert E. Lee, where you usually stay—”
“Morning, Birdie!” Rory said. He looked very happy to see me. Or maybe he was very
happy Frances had to stop talking a second.
“Morning, Bird,” Frances said. Her hair was in perfect beige finger waves, she had ruby
lipstick on, but she was still in a long pink bathrobe with a ruffle at the neck. I sat down beside
her. “We’re talking about my birthday. Can you believe I’ll be twenty-two in three weeks?
Practically an old lady,” she said. Then she patted my arm. “Sorry.”
Rory had on a tight blue tie today that made his face look very round. Circles ringed his
eyes like he’d hardly slept, and even with his boyish face, I could see he was a few years older
than Frances.
Picador came through the swinging door. “You didn’t eat no supper last night,” she said,
pouring Rory coffee. They were almost eye level, she was so small.
“I promise to eat my breakfast, Pic,” Rory said and grinned at her.
“Picador,” Frances said loudly. “I’d like some cream.” When Picador went in the kitchen,
Frances said, “Every day I have to ask for it.” She turned back to Rory. “Anyway, Garnett said
there’s this restaurant in Jackson called Rotisserie and they serve filet mignon and there’s a
banana dish they light on fire right at your table—”
“I have to go to Jackson so much already, dear,” Rory said. “Can’t we just go to dinner
somewhere in town?”
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Frances was locked and loaded: “Then what about Memphis? The train only takes a
couple hours. We could stay at the Peabody, I saw it in a magazine—they have these ducks that
swim around in a fountain in the lobby.”
Rory smiled at me, the company, and lower, he said, “I told you, Frances, I don’t want us
taking expensive trips right now, it looks bad. We ought to be careful ourselves, these are
unpredictable times.”
“But. I want us to go somewhere.” Frances dropped her hands in her lap. “Just the two of
us.”
Easing back from her, I saw that same look that Rory had last night: I want to get out of
here. But he said, “What if—what if we went down to the Delta for your birthday? I could see
the plantation you grew up on and where all your ancestors are from.” He looked at me. “What
do you think, Birdie? Don’t you think your mother and grandmother would like that?”
I licked my lips and aimed my answer at Frances. “Heavens, Mother and Grandmother
would be tickled to death to have y’all at the Calhoun Plantation.” Those slick little lies again.
Frances was fixated on pouring the cream that Picador’d finally brought her into her coffee. It
was practically white. I gave her an extra second to think about Rory getting a peek at our grand
lifestyle, then I said, “But I’m afraid this is just not a good time. Mother hasn’t been feeling well
lately.”
“Are you sure?” Rory said. “I thought it sounded like a good idea—”
“Supper in town’s just fine,” Frances said. She took a sip of her cream with coffee.
A few minutes later, Mrs. Tartt came in wearing a long, pale blue housecoat. “Good
morning. Morning, son,” she said and touched the top of his shoulder.
“Mother,” Rory said and refolded his napkin on his lap.
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Smoothing her housecoat under her bottom, she sat on Rory’s right. Right on cue,
Picador came in and set a plate with two shot-glass-sized biscuits in front of Mrs. Tartt and a
plate of pancakes in front of Rory. She served Frances her single piece of toast last.
“How do you always know what I want, Pic?” Rory said and grinned at her. He seemed
more affectionate with her than he was with his own mother.
“Won’t you eat something, Birdie?” Mrs. Tartt said.
“She made herself eggs,” Picador said and went in the kitchen.
“You like to cook?” Mrs. Tartt said, smoothing butter on a biscuit. “I used to cook all the
time when I first got married. Frances doesn’t like to.”
“I like to cook,” Frances said.
I patted her arm and said, “We know, but please don’t.” I’d pay for that later. Frances
said nothing, but Mrs. Tartt smiled. Least somebody here thought I was funny.
“Before Henry’d opened the bank, he liked to cook too. Course the next year Rory was
born and we hired Picador.” She looked at Rory, waiting for him to look back at her. He didn’t.
“Last time I went in the bank I hardly saw a soul left from Henry’s days,” she said.
“When did you go to the bank, Mama?” Rory asked. He was looking at her now, his fork
in the air.
“Oh it’s been a month, you remember, I came in for my dividend. That reminds me, when
you get to the office, I want you to call Jackson and check on the Fraser painting. That restorer’s
had it for months.” Rory nodded and went back to eating his pancakes.
“What all do you do at the bank?” I asked him. I’d never even been inside a bank before.
Daddy’d called bankers crooks.
“He’s a vice president,” Frances said.
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“I handle investments mostly, speculation, futures,” Rory said. “We’re in all the big
American exchanges, a few overseas too.” He sounded confident, which I took as a good sign
since I was here to ask for money. I also took it to mean he was still making some, even in these
“unpredictable” times. “We write mortgages and loans, too, though of course no one’s loaning
much of anything these days.”
“That,” I said, “is a shame.”
“How is the market doing, son?” Mrs. Tartt asked. “I saw in the paper this week it was up
a little.”
“Down yesterday,” Rory said. “There’s no point worrying about it.”
He stood up from the table, and Frances touched his hand. “Don’t forget it’s my day at
the Orphan and you said you’d drive me since Pripp can’t.”
We’d discussed this last night, when I’d asked Frances if she could change her “day” and
spend it with me. She’d looked offended and said, “But it’s my day.”
“And I was thinking Birdie could ride along with us and you could let her out at the
square to look around, and maybe she could come in and see the bank too—”
“I’m sorry, I forgot. I can’t drive you this morning.” Rory dug down in his pants pocket
and set a quarter and three dimes on the table. He took back one of the dimes. “I have to be in
early. See can Mr. Binny come pick you up.”
“What if . . . we all had lunch together, then?” Frances said. “I could get a ride to the
bank around noon and meet you both there, Garnett won’t mind—”
“I can’t leave work, Frances. I’ve got meetings one after the other. My secretary’ll bring
me something for lunch.” He bumped his lips on her cheek. “I’ll try not to be too late. See you
tonight.”
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When Mrs. Tartt had left the table too and it was just us, Frances said, “Birdie.”
“I’m sorry, but you cook like you’re trying to poison somebody—”
“Thanks, for what you said about the trip home. I promise I’ll bring Rory home one day, I
just need a little more time.”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure your ancestors will understand.”
I followed her to the telephone in the hall, but before she picked it up, she eyed me up
and pursed her lips. “Garnett’s been looking for somebody to work on the books. And you’re
pretty good at that.” As she informed me of this breaking news, she tapped her foot, thinking.
“I’ll ask if you can come in with me tomorrow and help out in the office.” It wasn’t a question.
She picked up the telephone and asked the operator to ring Mr. Binny to come get her, I
gathered so she wouldn’t have to pay for the call. Then she started up the stairs. “Get ready to go
in twenty minutes. And don’t wear that dress.”
***
I owned two pairs of shoes. They were on a strict schedule. My W. B. Coon black button-up
boots from 1925 were worn on Sundays and special occasions, and my comfortable brown-and-
white oxfords I wore all the other days, including today. To make up for it, I put on blue dress
number three, the nicest one, with imitation pearl buttons, and clipped my brown hair back the
way Frances had done it last night. It still lay lank against my face.
Frances came into my yellow room. She had on an “industrious yet fashionable”
volunteer look today: olive-colored dress with lots of square pockets and a red kerchief tied
around her long neck. She looked my outfit over but said nothing, which I found right rude—I
hadn’t seen her in a year and she could at least take the time to criticize me a minute.
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“You’re still wearing that old hat?” She couldn’t resist it. It was my short-brimmed straw
hat with the red silk flower I’d ordered in the mail for three dollars and fifty cents.
“It’s not but two years old.” It was my one nice thing.
She took a deep breath, swallowing whatever else she wanted to say. You’d’ve thought
she was trying to swallow a cotton boll.
A few minutes later, Mr. Binny tooted his horn and held open the back door of his little
taxicab for us. He was a short, heavyset man in a wide-cut black suit, with near black skin and a
gray horseshoe of hair. His demeanor was grumpy. Maybe because, Frances had told me, he used
to “take up” with Picador after her husband died the year before, but their romance had since
soured, and Mrs. Tartt had to ask her not to scowl at him through the window.
In the backseat, Mr. Binny folded a green footstool down like a church hassock for our
feet to sit on and drove us toward town. Though it was right warm, Frances insisted on keeping
the windows up so we wouldn’t get dusty.
“All this land used to belong to the Tartts,” she said, “but like I said, Rory sold it off a
few years ago.”
“I hope it was before prices went to nothing,” I said. Frances shrugged; didn’t know,
didn’t care. “What’s that house?” I asked. It was a little closer to the road and big as the Tartts’,
but their yard looked even more overgrown. Signs were pasted onto its white pillars.
“That’s the Percy house, old friends of the Tartts’. They lost all their money in the crash,
but don’t bring it up around Mrs. Tartt or you’ll have to hear her talk about it for hours.”
For the rest of the ride, I thought of the dreaded conversation about why I’d come to visit.
Another minute and we pulled up to the square.
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I hadn’t really seen the square properly when I’d arrived the day before. “Y’all have a lot
of stores to choose from,” I said, getting out of the taxi. Twenty, thirty, probably fifty businesses
were pushed together around the square. A paved road inside it circled an impressively-sized
white courthouse. It was several stories tall, with a four-sided clocktower perched atop the roof
so you’d know what time it was no matter what side you stood on. In the parched grass around it,
wagons stood full of watermelons and cantaloupes and vegetables, their mules tied up to hitching
posts.
Through the open car door, Frances handed me fifteen cents. “Here, buy yourself a drink
and a little something.” I found this smug though I was probably being sensitive. I wasn’t
dreading asking her for money because I was afraid she’d be upset; I was afraid of how happy
she’d probably look about it. “But bring me the change,” she added.
It wasn’t even nine yet but already it was getting hot. I strolled under the eave shading the
storefronts. Only a couple dozen people were on the square this morning, so not a crowd, but it
would be considered a mass mob in Footely. According to Rory’s Oxford Eagle newspaper I’d
read this morning, Oxford was just under three thousand people. Footely’s population was 330,
329 when I was out of town. They seemed to have a store for anything you needed here, plus
several you didn’t. I passed Ruth’s Dress Shop, City Grocery, Patton Beauty Shop, where I saw a
lady through the window with a blue contraption on her head and wires springing out of it. A
store called Shine Morgan Appliance was peddling a Maytag Agitator Clothes Washer Wringer
in the window for only $41 dollars! How we would love to own one of those, our washer was
ancient, but for forty-one dollars I could put a down payment on a Ford coupe. In the window of
the Gathright-Reed drugstore, a poster asked the ever-pressing question DOES YOUR
HUSBAND SAY YOU ARE OFTEN IN POOR HUMOR? with a picture of a woman, kind of
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wild-eyed, smiling, holding up a brown bottle. When a man pushed the door open to the
drugstore, a string of bells jangled so loud, I could see why she needed something to calm her
nerves. On the outside corner, an arrow pointed upstairs to Falkner Law Services and O H
Douglas & Co. Undertakers, meaning a person could get dressed, have their hair styled, get a
better attitude, plan their funeral, and sue somebody all in the stretch of about forty feet.
Still, I passed an empty, dark window, like a tooth missing, every five or six stores.
Plenty of shopkeepers leaned in their doorways, waiting, maybe terminally, for customers. So
not everybody here was prospering. The people walking around seemed to cover a range of
financial situations as well—a woman all dressed up in yellow silk with a patent leather handbag
clipped past a slow-moving fellow with one shoe sole flapping. I guess the better you dressed
here, the faster you moved. The tattered man joined a row of more men, white and colored,
leaning on a rail, also waiting on something I wasn’t sure was coming. Work, I guess. The
shoeshine seat stood empty, with a colored man dozing at the bottom. It felt as if much of the
town was waiting on something. Then I realized what it was.
The largest shop was on the north side of the square, called the J. E. Neilson Co.
Department Store. A wall of wide windows ran across the front, shaded by a blue-and-white-
striped awning. I peered through the glass at a pair of stiff wooden people gazing back at me,
wearing bright red sweaters, the wooden man holding a shouting horn painted with the words
Ole Miss. A banner over his head read College days will be here soon! I realized almost
everybody, from shoe shiners to sweater sellers, was waiting on the college students to return.
“I guess it gets busier around here when the university’s back in session?” I asked a man
cleaning the shop window. He was stylishly dressed in wide khaki trousers and suspenders.
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“In a month, you wouldn’t guess it’s the same town,” he said. He looked at my old-
fashioned boots and homemade dress, deciding that while I ought to be a customer, I probably
was not. But he was still friendly about it.
“You visiting?” he asked.
“My sister, Frances,” I said. “Married to Rory Tartt?”
He stopped polishing and his eyes turned flat as the wooden people in the window. He
smiled but it was tight. “Course. I know Rory. Give our best to Mrs. Tartt.” He strode his fancy
pressed trousers inside. Huh. I had no idea what that was about.
It was getting seriously hot now so I went in the Variety Everyday & Grocer to buy a
cold drink with Frances’s money. It had high, tin-tiled ceilings and smelled like wood shavings
and had rows of metal bins of onions and something called a shallot, three kinds of potatoes,
flour that came in prepacked bags instead of a barrel. I reached down into a red cooler of ice as a
delicious shock shot up my arm. I took a dripping bottle of Co-Cola to the counter. Mr. Parkins
wouldn’t pay the extra bond for Co-Cola, so we only carried Chero.
A colored man bumped into me—“’Scuse me, ma’am.” I realized he’d backed away to let
a white man check out ahead of him. The colored man stood about five feet away, silent and
waiting. I went back to poking around the vegetables. It was the same at the Foote, colored folks
moved aside to let the white folks go first, but they at least chatted while they waited, whether
they knew each other or not. “Get yer seed in the ground yet?” “That sure was some rain last
night.” There seemed to be a silence in Oxford, quiet and heavy, between white folks and
colored folks.
When I finally went and set my bottle on the counter, an old man in a red bow tie said
it’d be a nickel and, “Don’t reckon I seen you in here before.”
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“No sir, I’m just visiting.”
“Must be here for the college, what you matriculatin’ in?”
I slid him a dime, and watching his expression, I said, “I’m here visiting with my sister
Frances, married to Rory Tartt?”
The old man held on to my nickel change an extra second. Behind dry lips, his tongue
moved over his teeth. He gave a short, curt nod and handed me the nickel without another word.
What in the world? It did not seem like folks cared to hear the names Frances and Rory.
I found a bench in the shade and fanned my warm face with my hat. Even the stationery
I’d brought in my pocketbook was limp from the heat. I wrote carefully on my knee so the pencil
wouldn’t stab through the paper.
Dear Mama and Meemaw,
I arrived in Oxford in one piece. Frances is fine and there’s no need to worry.
Rory and Mrs. Tartt have both been kind and welcoming. Frances’s house has
more indoor bathrooms than they have rear ends and I wish you could see all the
stores in this town
I stopped writing, staring at a statue of a Confederate soldier. I refused to brag about a
place Mama and Meemaw might never be invited to because Frances regarded us as a homemade
embarrassment. So I erased the last line and wrote,
Frances says how very sorry she is she didn’t write or call but she will very soon.
I’ll ask her about the money tonight.
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Love, Birdie
I went into the post office in the back of city hall and bought a three-cent stamp, happy to
be out of the sun for a minute. When I walked out, I dropped Frances’s two cents change into a
red box nailed to a post, with the words ORPHANAGE DONATIONS painted on it. It made a
satisfying clinking sound.
I wasn’t sure what else to do with my morning, so I decided to go for a walk in the
neighborhood, headed south, at least to give the illusion of a breeze. Under the shade of old oak
trees, I passed a few huge, gothic-style houses with deep green yards. A pair of colored women
with baskets on their heads were going from back door to back door. They seemed to be
collecting white folks’ laundry. Like they had on North Lamar, the houses eventually grew less
grand and the road turned to dirt, and I admired a middling-sized house with a pretty stone
fountain out front with an angel praying up to the sky.
I was about to turn around and go back in the direction of the Tartts’ when a truck came
rumbling up slowly behind me. I glanced back and saw it was loaded with teetering fruit crates.
There was a car behind it, and when the road widened, the car drove wide around the truck. It
was a long-nosed, two-toned gray whale of a car, a Studebaker like I’d seen parked by the barn
this morning—is that Rory? The car drove on ahead but from behind I could see him, or
somebody like him, short, roundheaded, a little man in a big car. It turned right, heading away
from the square.
***
Supper was just the three of us again, though this time it was short and sweet and definitely too
salty. It was an Oriental duck and noodle dish served from a blue-and-white urn. It was awfully
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rich and had involved Picador frowning at an old newspaper clipping from, of all things, The
New York Times. I’d heard her murmur, “Miss Viktoria don’t need to be eating something this
thick.”
There was a long stretch of silence while we ate without Rory again. They both kept
glancing in the direction of the road at the slightest sound. Mrs. Tartt, sitting across from Frances
again, had gone to the beauty parlor today but her hair looked exactly the same as before, round,
stiff, and creamy. Which, I knew, was the point. Living with two aging women, I understood that
change was to be feared since it only went in one direction, which was old, so the least you could
do was hold on to the same hairstyle you had when you were thirty-nine. It suited Mrs. Tartt
though, framing her pretty, pleasant face.
For a little while, we ate in silence. The chairs were uncomfortable, shallow and upright.
I’d much rather we ate in the kitchen where, like at home, I could read the newspaper while I ate
or listen to The King Biscuit Flour Hour. At my rudest, I’d sometimes prop our orange cat up in
Mama’s chair and serve it a plate of whatever I was eating with a napkin tied around her neck if I
had to eat alone. Problem solved. Somehow this was lonelier than eating alone.
Finally Frances stopped forking food into her mouth and leaned back. “Tomorrow
Garnett said you could come on in the Orphan with me and see can you help straighten out the
books.”
“I’m happy to help,” I said. I didn’t know how long I’d be here but I didn’t have anything
else to do when Frances was off volunteering.
“—And guess what? A new baby got dropped off today and she is the most precious
thing you’ve ever seen in your life. She has these fat cheeks and big blue eyes—” My sister
looked ravenous, bloodthirsty, talking about that baby. She took such a big, chewy bite of meat
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that if she’d said, So I stuck a fork in that baby and I ate it up, I would not have been surprised.
(Mama says my humor type is depraved.)
“I hope we get some more,” Frances said, wiping her mouth.
“You’re hoping for more orphans,” I said.
“Just a few more babies. With this new one, we still don’t have but two.”
I looked at her but she did not see my point.
“How many girls do you have right now?” Mrs. Tartt asked.
Covering her mouth chewing, Frances said, “Seventeen now, but not that many are cute
little ones.”
“Poor things,” Mrs. Tartt said and tsked. “When Mary Pepper ran the Orphan, there
weren’t but seven or eight girls there. Course that was down from twenty-five when the place
first started. They opened it on account of the flood in ’27.”
I nodded; everybody knew the flood she was speaking of. Daddy’d showed us harrowing
photographs taken after the Mississippi River had swallowed entire families, houses and all their
livestock over in Greenville. Daddy helped design the levee system to keep it from happening
again, so it was interesting to me that what Daddy’d done for a living was also what got Frances
out of bed in the morning to put on ridiculous outfits.
“Greenville and Oxford women’s clubs have always been close,” Mrs. Tartt said. “They
asked me to join the senior committee, but I was already vice chairlady of the Flower Club.
Frances, any mention of you joining the senior committee yet?”
Frances finished a mouthful of noodles. Finally she said, “No.”
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At seven thirty, Rory still wasn’t home. No one said anything about it, and by eight, I was
in my white nightgown in the yellow room, feeling warm and waxy. I’d be sneaking down to that
screened-in sleeping porch after I had my talk with Frances.
When I knocked on her door, she opened it wearing a pale silky nightgown with a bow
tied in front. She smelled like lavender from a bath and had on fresh lipstick. Clearly she’d been
hoping I was Rory. She climbed back up on her bed, and I looked around. Her bed had a roof
like mine, but instead of a scorching yellow, hers was the color of the Lydia Pinkham female aid
I sold at the ladies’ counter, a milky rose. On a mirrored dressing table was a Mathilda Tate–
esque silver hairbrush, a powder puff and box of powder, and a framed picture of, no surprise,
herself. Frances’s face peeped from a high-necked wedding dress festooned by white lilies. Her
hand-colored lips were red and parted like she’d just said Frances. She wasn’t saying Footely,
that was for sure. I saw nothing in here from home, not even the jewelry box Granddaddy’d
made her with her initials carved on top. Where had it gone? I wondered. Had she stuck it in a
drawer like she’d done to us? I also saw nothing that looked even remotely like it belonged to
Rory.
“What are you doing?” Frances said from the bed.
“Being nosy.” I opened her double-door wardrobe and saw it was full of hanging clothes,
folded sweaters, drawers of stockings and brassieres. Growing up, we’d shared a small closet and
one dresser between us. “Franny, what is this?”
It was a pink strappy satin thing dripping off a hanger, with high-cut legs, less than the
size of a swimming costume. I held the thing up and Frances’s cheeks went whiter; she didn’t
tend to turn tomato red like I did when I was embarrassed. She slipped off the bed and reached
for it, saying, “Put that back, it’s private.”
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“Where’d you get it?” I asked, handing it over.
“I ordered it. From New Orleans.” She sounded mortified. “I was saving it for my
birthday trip, but I guess we’re not going anywhere.”
“Bring it to Footely, you can wear it around the plantation.”
Something glittered near the crotch, and when she saw me looking at it, she said,
“They’re called snaps. It’s the new thing, they pop right open. I can’t afford any kind of a
malfunction again.”
I laughed, snorted really. “What sort of malfunction?”
She stuck her nose up, Frances style. “You’d have to be married to understand.” She
hung it back up so it couldn’t be discussed further by her old-maid sister. Honestly, I couldn’t
believe she’d said as much as she had. Frances did not like to discuss intimate relations, at least
not with me. The last time was probably in high school, when the topic had been who was or
wasn’t “necking” or, according to her, “worse.”
So I didn’t press her, but I was curious: “Why aren’t Rory’s clothes in here? Does he not
stay with you?”
“Of course he does.” But then she said, “I mean. Sometimes.” Then she said, “He likes to
sleep in his old room down the hall.” I wondered, did she mean the door with the lock on it?
Maybe I didn’t know my sister as well as I’d thought. That scandalous outfit, a husband who had
to lock his wife out to keep her off him? I laughed at the thought. God, I could so easily entertain
myself. Or maybe I was just trying not to think about what I was really in here to ask.
I climbed up on Frances’s bed and sat at her feet, the way I used to when she’d come
home after a date. As I did, a pair of car lamps dragged across the wall. There wasn’t much
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traffic out here and I thought, I better ask fast. Frances watched the lights, but the car drove on.
She leaned back on the headboard and crossed her arms.
I took a breath, about to ask her, when out of the blue she blurted, “How come you’re
always so content?” She’d narrowed her eyes at me. “I swear, you’re the most content person
I’ve ever known.”
“I am not content,” I said. She’d said it like this was tacky of me, like my country
fashions she didn’t approve of. “In fact, I am extremely discontented, every day, by something I
taste or smell or read in the newspaper. How come you’re so content?” I looked around the pretty
pink plush room, trying to find a flaw. “Never mind, don’t answer that.”
“You are too.” She picked at a loose thread on the coverlet. “You’re perfectly content to
live in Footely for the rest of your life. Work at the Foote, take care of Mama and Meemaw. Live
in the same house you grew up in.”
“I’m sorry my life isn’t as swanky or exciting as yours. I’ll work on it.”
“At least nobody’s built up all these expectations of you. First it’s when are you gonna
get married, then it’s when are you gonna have a baby, then it’ll be when are you gonna have
another baby. You don’t even have to worry about having children.”
I smiled at her slowly, sweetly. It was true, I was damaged goods. The mumps had
scorched my ovaries. But that she’d bring this up made me want to ask her why her husband had
lied that he was too busy to eat lunch with her when I’d seen him on the road. Or why he didn’t
sleep in the same bedroom with her, or why Mathilda Tate never once wrote her back after
Frances’d helped her graduate. I could’ve asked her these things, pretending it was innocent, but
I wouldn’t do that to her. All I said was, “You’re going to have beautiful children, Frances, just
give it time.”
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And then I changed the subject before I lost my nerve tonight. “Listen, I need to talk to
you about something.”
I turned to look at the window so I wouldn’t have to look her in the eyes and told her that
the Bad Things Happening had managed to catch up with us, leaving out the more humiliating
details such as how little Mr. Parkins paid me but also not reminding her of the four dollars and
seventy-five cents in train tickets plus long-distance telephone call we could’ve saved if she’d
just written us back. So, in a way, I was being considerate of my sister’s feelings. “We were
hoping you could please loan us some money to get by.” Loan was my own word, to maintain
some pride.
She smoothed the silky gown against her thighs and smiled, I assumed, at my
humiliation. My face felt hot, pimply. I felt like I was twelve. “About how much?” she asked.
I shot high. “Maybe two hundred fifty dollars?”
She backed her chin up. “That’s a lot.”
“Daddy’s annuity check is still eight months away.”
She took in a deep breath and let it out, considering it. I got even more nervous than I
already had been. Up to now, I’d thought about her saying no the way I thought about the world
ending—there was always the chance the sun could pummel into us, but I doubted it would
happen. This thinking it over she was doing felt worse than her smiling. Did she really have to
contemplate whether she should help her family out? Did she understand what would happen if
she said no? Besides the fact they’d cut our lights off and we couldn’t pay for gasoline to get me
to work, we’d be two years and forty-three dollars and fifty cents overdue on our property taxes.
They’d take our house like they’d taken the Tates’, which I’d deliberately left out because I
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wanted Frances to say yes without that fact. But Frances was still thinking—and I wanted to ask
her, Is your heart really buried so deep, Franny?
“You know what, if it’s that hard to decide, I’ll just ask Rory myself,” I said.
“No—no, do not bring up money around Rory.” She pressed her temples with her fingers,
clearly shook up by this.
“Then I’ll ask his mother.” That didn’t sound like much fun either, but I’d do it.
“Perfect, then she really will think we’re poor.”
“Just because we don’t have any money, Franny, doesn’t mean we’re poor. Daddy was a
civil engineer, for God’s sake. We’re still doing better than . . . most.” I took a deep breath. “The
Tates lost their house and all their land for taxes last week. We’re better off than they are now.”
“Oh my God—really?” I searched her face for the hint of a smile but there was none. She
just looked stunned by the news.
“I’ll figure out how to ask Rory. He’s just—he’s real sensitive about money. Or least
when it comes to me.”
I made a point to look over at the wardrobe full of beautiful clothes and shoes. Frances
waved her hand like they were old rags over there on hangers. “Mrs. Tartt took me shopping
when we got engaged and put it on her account. I think she felt sorry for me when she saw my
old dresses.”
I worried a split second that maybe this wasn’t just Frances’s selfishness or
embarrassment that her family needed money, maybe it was something else. But I was too
relieved the asking part was over with to worry long. “Thank you, Franny. And I’m sorry to do
this to you.” I wasn’t sure why I was sorry, but I was. “Please write Mama tomorrow so she’ll
quit worrying.”
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“I will, I know I need to,” she said, twisting her gold wedding ring. “She must’ve been a
wreck that I didn’t call.”
“I’d call it a perpetual state of mind.”
Lights slid across the room again and a minute later, there was a gentle shudder through
the house as a door closed. Frances slid off the bed in her satin gown and went to the dressing
table and looked quickly at herself in the mirror. “I’ll talk to him, give me some time. Let me do
it after my birthday.”
“That’s three weeks away . . . can’t you ask him sooner?”
“When, at breakfast? Please pass the preserves, by the way I need two hundred fifty
dollars? I’m telling you, Birdie, he gets grumpy when it comes to money, but I promise, I’ll find
the right time.”
I didn’t love the idea of her asking him after I left; I was afraid it wouldn’t happen. We
stared at each other a second.
Frances sighed. But instead of saying she’d ask him sooner, she said, “Fine, stay for my
birthday.” She shrugged. “It’s . . . kind of nice to have you here anyway.”
I thought it over. Staying was definitely the safest choice, Mr. Parkins would have to
wait. “I’ll be ready at eight to go to the orphanage.” I was glad I could give her some small thing
in return for asking for the money. Debts itched my very soul.
When the house got quiet and I’d heard all the bedroom doors shut, I crept across the hall
and lay down on a squeaky wire cot out on the old sleeping porch. I’d brought my sheet and
pillow over from the inferno but I was burning up, so I stripped my nightgown off and lay naked
on the mattress. My skin prickled as a summer breeze blew in through the metal screens.
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