My aunt was bridling daintily at the unopened envelope in her hand. "Of course you'll be riding out there Sunday, girls, and without me."
"Open it—what does she say now?" said Kate to her mother. "Ma'am? If Uncle Felix—"
"Uncle Felix! Is he still living?"
Kate went "Shh!"
But I had only arrived the day before yesterday; and we had of course had so much to catch up with, besides, necessarily, parties. They expected me to keep up in spite of being gone almost my whole life, except for visits—I was taken away from Mississippi when I was eight. I was the only one in Aunt Ethel's downstairs bedroom neither partially undressed nor, to use my aunt's word, "reclining."
"Of course he is," said Aunt Ethel, tearing open the envelope at once, and bringing out an old-fashioned "correspondence card" filled up on both sides with a sharp, jet-black hand, and reading the end. Uncle Felix was her uncle, only my great-uncle. "He is," she said to Kate.
"Still this, still that," murmured Kate, looking at me sidelong. She was up on the bed too. She leaned lightly across her mother, who was in pink negligée, read ahead of her for an instant, and plucked the last piece of the city candy I had brought from the big shell dish Rachel had seen fit to put it in.
Uncontrite, I rocked. However, I did see I must stop showing what might be too much exuberance in Aunt Ethel's room, since she was old and not strong, and take things more as they came. Kate and I were double first cousins, I was the younger, and neither married yet, but I was not going to be an old maid! I was already engaged up North; though I had not yet come to setting a date for my wedding. Kate, though, as far as I could tell, didn't have anybody.
My little aunt, for her heart's sake, had to lie propped up. There inside her tester bed she sometimes looked out as if, I thought, she were riding in some old-fashioned carriage or litter. Now she had drawn that card and its envelope both to her pillowed face. She was smelling them. Mingo, of course, was the home place. It was miles from anywhere, and I saw that she was not to go there any more.
"Look at the gilt edge," she said, shining it. "Isn't it remarkable about Sister Anne? I wonder what drawer she went into to find that to favor us with?... 'Had to drop—' watch?—no, 'water on his tongue—yesterday so he could talk ... Must watch him—day and night,' underlined. Poor old man. She insists, you know, Dicey, that's what she does."
"Buzzard," said Kate.
"Who," I sighed, for I thought she had said "sister," and there was no sister at all left of my Aunt Ethel's. But my mind had wandered for a moment. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, after an enormous dinner at which we had had company—six girls, chattering almost like ready-made bridesmaids—ending with wonderful black, bitter, moist chocolate pie under mountains of meringue, and black, bitter coffee. We could hear Rachel now, off in the distance, peacefully dropping the iced-tea spoons into the silver drawer in the pantry.
In this little courthouse town, several hours by inconvenient train ride from Jackson, even the cut grass in the yards smelled different from Northern grass. (Even by evidence of smell, I knew that really I was a stranger in a way, still, just at first.) And the spring was so much farther advanced—the birds so busy you turned as you would at people as they plunged by. Bloom was everywhere in the streets, wistaria just ending, Confederate jasmine beginning. And down in the gardens!—they were deep colored as old rugs in the morning and evening shade. Everybody grew some of the best of everybody else's flowers; by the way, if you thank a friend for a flower, it will not grow for you. Everywhere we went calling, Kate brought me out saying, "Here she is! Got off the train talking, and hasn't stopped yet." And everywhere, the yawning, inconvenient, and suddenly familiar rooms were as deep and inviting and compelling as the yawning big roses opening and shattering in one day in the heating gardens. At night, the moths were already pounding against the screens.
Aunt Ethel and Kate, and everybody I knew here, lived as if they had never heard of anywhere else, even Jackson—in houses built, I could judge now as a grown woman and a stranger, in the local version of the 1880's—tall and spread out at the bottom, with porches, and winged all over with awnings and blinds. As children, Kate and I were brought up across the street from each other—they were her grandfather's and my grandmother's houses. From Aunt Ethel's front window I could see our chinaberry tree, which Mother had always wanted to cut down, standing in slowly realized bloom. Our old house was lived in now by a family named Brown, who were not very much, I gathered—the porch had shifted, and the screens looked black as a set of dominoes.
Aunt Ethel had gone back to the beginning of her note now. "Oh-oh. Word has penetrated even Mingo, Miss Dicey Hastings, that you're in this part of the world! The minute you reached Mississippi our little paper had that notice you laughed at, that was all about your mother and me and your grandmother, so of course there's repercussions from Sister Anne. Why didn't we tell her! But honestly, she might be the remotest kin in the world, for all you know when you're well, but let yourself get to ailing, and she'd show up in Guinea, if that's where you were, and stay. Look at Cousin Susan, 'A year if need be' is the way she put it about precious Uncle Felix."
"She'll be coming to you next if you don't hush about her," said Kate, sitting bolt upright on the bed. She adored her mother, her family. What she had was company-excitement. And I guess I had trip-excitement—I giggled. My aunt eyed us and tucked the letter away.
"But who is she, pure and simple?" I said.
"You'd just better not let her in," said Aunt Ethel to Kate. "That's what. Sister Anne Fry, dear heart. Declares she's wild to lay eyes on you. I should have shown you the letter. Recalls your sweet manners toward your elders. Sunday's our usual day to drive out there, you remember, Dicey, but I'm inclined to think—I feel now—it couldn't be just your coming brought on this midweek letter. Uncle Felix was taken sick on Valentine's Day and she got there by Saturday. Kate, since you're not working this week—if you're going, you'd better go on today."
"Oh, curses!" cried Kate to me. Kate had told them at the bank she was not working while I was here. We had planned something.
"Mama, what is she?" asked Kate, standing down in her cotton petticoat with the ribbon run in. She was not as tall as I. "I may be as bad as Dicey but I don't intend to go out there today without you and not have her straight."
Aunt Ethel looked patiently upwards as if she read now from the roof of the tester, and said, "Well, she's a remote cousin of Uncle Felix's, to begin with. Your third cousin twice removed, and your Great-aunt Beck's half-sister, my third cousin once removed and my aunt's half-sister, Dicey's—"
"Don't tell me!" I cried. "I'm not that anxious to claim kin!"
"She'll claim you! She'll come visit you!" cried Kate.
"I won't be here long enough." I could not help my smiles.
"When your mother was alive and used to come bringing you, visits were different," said my Aunt Ethel. "She stayed long enough to make us believe she'd fully got here. There'd be time enough to have alterations, from Miss Mattie, too, and transplant things in the yard if it was the season, even start a hook-rug—do a morning glory, at least—even if she'd never really see the grand finale.... Our generation knew more how to visit, whatever else escaped us, not that I mean to criticize one jot."
"Mama, what do you want?" said Kate in the middle of the floor. "Let me get you something."
"I don't want a thing," said her mother. "Only for my girls to please themselves."
"Well then, tell me who it was that Sister Anne one time, long time ago, was going to marry and stood up in the church? And she was about forty years old!" Kate said, and lightly, excitedly, lifted my hat from where I'd dropped it down on the little chair some time, to her own head—bare feet, petticoat, and all. She made a face at me.
Her mother was saying, "Now that is beyond me at the moment, perhaps because it didn't come off. Though he was some kind of off-cousin, too, I seem to recall ... I'll have it worked out by the time you girls get
back from where you're going.—Very becoming, dear."
"Kate," I said, "I thought Uncle Felix was old beyond years when I was a child. And now I'll be old in ten years, and so will you. And he's still alive."
"He was old!" cried Kate. "He was!"
"Light somewhere, why don't you," said her mother.
Kate perched above me on the arm of my chair, and we gently rocked.
I said, "He had red roses on his suspenders."
"When did he ever take his coat off for you to see that?" objected my aunt. "The whole connection always went out there for Sundays, and he was a very strict gentleman all his life, you know, and made us be ladies out there, more even than Mama and Papa did in town."
"But I can't remember a thing about Sister Anne," I said. "Maybe she was too much of a lady."
"Foot," said my aunt.
Kate said in a prompting, modest voice, "She fell in the well."
I cried joyously, "And she came out! Oh, I remember her fine! Mournful! Those old black drapey dresses, and plastered hair."
"That was just the way she looked when she came out of the well," objected Kate.
"Mournful isn't exactly the phrase," said my aunt.
"Plastered black hair, and her mouth drawn down, exactly like that aunt in the front illustration of your Eight Cousins," I told Kate. "I used to think that was who it was."
"You're so bookish," said my aunt flatly.
"This is where all the books were.!"—and there were the same ones now, no more, no less.
"On purpose, I think she fell," continued Kate. "Knowing there were plenty to pull her out. That was her contribution to Cousin Eva's wedding celebrations, and snitching a little of her glory. You're joggling me the way you're rocking."
"There's such a thing as being unfair, Kate," said her mother. "I always say, poor Sister Anne."
"Poor Sister Anne, then."
"And I think Dicey just thinks she remembers it because she's heard it."
"Well, at least she had something to be poor about!" I said irrepressibly. "Falling in the well, and being an old maid, that's two things!"
Kate cried, "Don't rock so headlong!"
"Maybe she even knew what she was about. Eva's Archie Fielder got drunk every whipstitch for the rest of his life," said Aunt Ethel.
"Only tell me this, somebody, and I'll be quiet," I said. "What poor somebody's Sister Anne was she to begin with?"
Then I held the rocker and leaned against my cousin. I was terrified that I had brought up Uncle Harlan. Kate had warned me again how, ever since his death seventeen years ago, Aunt Ethel could not bear to hear the name of her husband spoken, or to speak it herself.
"Poor Beck's, of course," said Aunt Ethel. "She's a little bit kin on both sides. Since you ask, Beck's half-sister—that's why we were always so careful to call her Sister."
"Oh. I thought that was just for teasing," said Kate.
"Well, of course the teasing element is not to be denied," said Aunt Ethel.
"Who began—" My hat was set, not at all rightly, on my own head by Kate—like a dunce cap.
The town was so quiet the doves from the river woods could be heard plainly. In town, the birds were quiet at this hour. Kate and I went on bobbing slowly up and down together as we rocked very gently by Aunt Ethel's bed. I saw us in the pier glass across the room. Looking at myself as the visitor, I considered myself as having a great deal still waiting to confide. My lips opened.
"He was ever so courtly," said my aunt. "Nobody in the family more so."
Kate with a tiny sting pulled a little hair from my neck, where it has always grown too low. I slapped at her wrist.
"But this last spell when I couldn't get out, and he's begun failing, what I remember about him is what I used to be told as a child, isn't that strange? When I knew him all my life and loved him. For instance, that he was a great one for serenading as a young man."
"Serenading!" said Kate and I together, adoring her and her memory. "I didn't know he could sing," said Kate.
"He couldn't. But he was a remarkable speller," said my aunt. "A born speller. I remember how straight he stood when they called the word. You know the church out there, like everything else in the world, raised its money by spelling matches. He knew every word in the deck. One time—one time, though!—I turned Uncle Felix down. I was not so bad myself, child though I was. And it isn't..."
"Ma'am?"
"It just isn't fair to have water dropped on your tongue, is it!"
"She ought not to have told you, the old buzzard!"
"The word," said Aunt Ethel, "the word was knick-knack. K-n-i-c-k, knick, hyphen, k-n-a-c-k, knack, knick-knack."
"She only writes because she has nothing else to do, away out yonder in the country!"
"She used to get dizzy very easily," Aunt Ethel spoke out in a firm voice, as if she were just waking up from a nap. "Maybe she did well—maybe a girl might do well sometimes not to marry, if she's not cut out for it."
"Aunt Ethel!" I exclaimed. Kate, sliding gently off the arm of my chair, was silent. But as if I had said something more, she turned around, her bare foot singing on the matting, her arm turned above her head, in a saluting, mocking way.
"Find me her letter again, Kate, where is it?" said Aunt Ethel, feeling under her solitaire board and her pillow. She held that little gilt-edged card, shook it, weighed it, and said, "All that really troubles me is that I can't bear for her to be on Uncle Felix's hands for so long! He was always so courtly, and his family's all, all in the churchyard now (but us!)—or New York!"
"Mama, let me bring you a drink of water."
"Dicey, I'm going to make you go to Mingo."
"But I want to go!"
She looked at me uncomprehending. Kate gave her a glass of water, with ice tinkling in it. "That reminds me, whatever you do, Kate, if you do go today, take that fresh Lady Baltimore cake out to the house—Little Di can sit and hold it while you drive. Poor Sister Anne can't cook and loves to eat. She can eat awhile. And make Rachel hunt through the shelves for some more green tomato pickle. Who'll put that up next year!"
"If you talk like that," said Kate, "we're going to go right this minute, right out into the heat. I thought this was going to be a good day."
"Oh, it is! Grand—Run upstairs both, and get your baths, you hot little children. You're supposed to go to Suzanne's, I know it." Kate, slow-motion, leaned over and kissed her mother, and took the glass. "Kate!—If only I could see him one more time. As he was. And Mingo. Old Uncle Theodore. The peace. Listen: you give him my love. He's my Uncle Felix. Don't tell him why I didn't come. That might distress him more than not seeing me there."
"What's Uncle Felix's trouble?" I asked, shyly at last: but things, even fatal things, did have names. I wanted to know.
Aunt Ethel smiled, looked for a minute as if she would not be allowed to tell me, and then said, "Old age.—I think Sister Anne's lazy, idle!" she cried. "You're drawing it out of me. She never cooked nor sewed nor even cultivated her mind! She was a lily of the field." Aunt Ethel suddenly showed us both highly polished little palms, with the brave gesture a girl uses toward a fortune teller—then looked into them a moment absently and hid them at her sides. "She just hasn't got anybody of her own, that's her trouble. And she needs somebody."
"Hush! She will be coming here next!" Kate cried, and our smiles began to brim once more.
"She has no inner resources," confided my aunt, and watched to see if I were too young to guess what that meant. "How you girls do set each other off! Not that you're bothering me, I love you in here, and wouldn't deprive myself of it. Yes, you all just better wait and go Sunday. Make things as usual." She shut her eyes.
"Look—look!" chanted Kate.
Rachel, who believed in cutting roses in the heat of the day—and nobody could prevent her now, since we forgot to cut them ourselves or slept through the mornings—came in Aunt Ethel's room bearing a vaseful. Aunt Ethel's roses were at their height. A look of satisfact
ion on Rachel's face was like something nobody could interrupt. To our sighs, for our swooning attitudes, she paraded the vase through the room and around the bed, where she set it on the little table there and marched back to her kitchen.
"Rachel wants you to go. All right, you tell Uncle Felix," said Aunt Ethel, turning toward the roses, spreading her little hand out chordlike over them, "—of course he must have these—that that's Souvenir de Claudius Pernet—and that's Mermaid—Mary Wallace—Silver Moon—those three of course Etoiles—and oh, Duquesa de Penaranda—Gruss an Aachen's of course his cutting he grew for me a thousand years ago— but there's my Climbing Thor! Gracious!" she sighed, looking at it. Still looking at the roses she waited a moment. Pressing out of the vase, those roses of hers looked heavy, drunken with their own light and scent, their stems, just two minutes ago severed with Rachel's knife, vivid with pale thorns through cut-glass. "You know, Sundays always are hotter than any other days, and I tell you what: I do think you'd better go on to Mingo today, regardless of what you find."
Circling around in her mind like old people—which Aunt Ethel never used to do, she never used to get back!—she got back to where she started.
"Yes'm," said Kate.
"Aunt Ethel, wouldn't it be better for everybody if he'd come in town to the hospital?" I asked, with all my city seriousness.
"He wouldn't consider it. So give Sister Anne my love, and give Uncle Felix my dear love. Will you remember? Go on, naked," said my aunt to her daughter. "Take your cousin upstairs in her city bonnet. You both look right feverish to me. Start in a little while, so you can get your visit over and come back in the cool of the evening."
"These nights now are so bright," said my cousin Kate, with a strange stillness in her small face, transfixed, as if she didn't hear the end of the messages and did not think who was listening to her either, standing with bare arms pinned behind her head, with the black slick hair pinned up, "these nights are so bright I don't mind, I don't care, how long any ride takes, or how late I ever get home!"