The Little Friend (2 page)

Robin’s grandmother had been out on the porch too, at some point; that much was certain, because she had taken a snapshot. There were not many men in the Cleve family and headstrong, masculine activities such as tree pruning, household repair, chauffeuring the elderly to grocery and church, had for the most part fallen to her. She did this cheerfully, with a brisk confidence that was the wonder of her timid sisters. None of them could even drive a car; and poor Aunt Libby was so afraid of appliances and mechanical apparatus of all sorts that she wept at the prospect of lighting a gas heater or changing a light bulb. Though they were intrigued by the camera, they were also wary of it, and they admired their sister’s breezy daring in handling this manly contraption that had to be loaded and aimed and shot like a gun. “Look at Edith,” they
would say, watching her wind the film or adjust the focus with swift professionalism. “There’s nothing Edith can’t do.”

Family wisdom had it that Edith, despite her dazzling and varied fields of competence, enjoyed no great gift with children. She was proud and impatient, and her manner did not encourage warmth; Charlotte, her only child, always ran to her aunts (Libby, particularly) for comfort, affection, reassurance. And though Harriet, the baby, had yet to show little in the way of preference for anyone, Allison was terrified by her grandmother’s brisk efforts to prod her out of silence, and cried when she was taken to her house to stay. But, oh, how Charlotte’s mother had loved Robin, and how he had loved her right back. She—a dignified, middle-aged lady—played catch with him in the front yard, and caught him snakes and spiders in her garden to play with; taught him funny songs she’d learned from the soldiers when she was a nurse in World War II:

which he sang right along with her in his hoarse, sweet little voice.

EdieEdieEdieEdieEdie!
Even her father and her sisters called her Edith, but Edie was the name he’d given her when he was barely old enough to talk, running madcap across the lawn, screaming with delight. Once, when Robin was about four, he had called her, in all seriousness,
old girl
. “Poor old girl,” he’d said, grave as an owl, patting her forehead with his small, freckled hand. Charlotte would never have dreamed of being so familiar with her sharp, businesslike mother, certainly not when she was lying down in her bedroom with a headache, but the incident amused Edie greatly and now it had become one of her favorite stories. Her hair was gray by the time he was born, but when she was young it had been as bright-penny red as Robin’s own:
For Robin Redbreast
or
My Own Red Robin
, she wrote on the tags to his birthday and Christmas gifts.
With love from your poor old girl
.

EdieEdieEdieEdieEdie!
He was nine years old, but it was a family joke now, his traditional greeting, his love song to
her; and he sang it out across the yard just as he always did, as she stepped out upon the porch on that last afternoon she ever saw him.

“Come give the old girl a kiss,” she called to him. But though he usually liked having his picture made, sometimes he was skittish about it—came out a red-headed blur, sharp elbows and kneecaps scrambling to get away—and when he saw the camera around Edie’s neck he was off and hiccuping with laughter.

“Come back to me, you scamp!” she called, and then, on impulse, she’d raised the camera and snapped it at him anyway. It was the last picture that they had of him. Out of focus. Flat expanse of green cut at a slight diagonal, with a white rail and the heaving gloss of a gardenia bush sharp in the foreground at the edge of the porch. Murky, storm-damp sky, shifting liquescence of indigo and slate, boiling clouds rayed with spokes of light. In the corner of the frame a blurred shadow of Robin, his back to the viewer, ran out across the hazy lawn to meet his death, which stood waiting for him—almost visible—in the dark place beneath the tupelo tree.

————

Days later, lying in the shuttered room, a thought had flickered across Charlotte’s mind beneath a mist of pills. Whenever Robin was going anywhere—to school, to a friend’s house, to spend the afternoon with Edie—it had always been important to him to say goodbye, in tender and frequently quite prolonged and ceremonious ways. She had a thousand memories of little notes he’d written, kisses blown from windows, his small hand chattering up and down at her from the backseats of departing cars:
goodbye! goodbye!
When he was a baby, he’d learned
bye-bye
long before
hello;
it was his way of greeting people as well as leaving them. It seemed particularly cruel to Charlotte that there had been no
goodbye
this time. She had been so distracted that she had no very clear recollection of the last words she’d exchanged with Robin, or even of the last time she’d seen him, when what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her—sightless now, stumbling—through
this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life. Half-mad with pain and sleeplessness, she’d babbled on and on to Libby (it was Aunt Libby who had got her through that time, Libby with her cool cloths and her aspics, Libby who had stayed awake with her all night for nights and nights, Libby who had never left her side, Libby who had saved her); for neither her husband nor anyone else was able to offer her the flimsiest solace; and though her own mother (who to outsiders appeared to be “taking things well”) was unchanged in her habits and her appearance, still going bravely about the business of the day, Edie would never be the same again. Grief had turned her into stone. It was a terrible thing to see. “Get out of that bed, Charlotte!” she would bark, throwing open the shutters; “here, have some coffee, brush your hair, you can’t lie around forever like this”; and even innocent old Libby shuddered sometimes at the brilliant coldness of Edie’s gaze as she turned from the window to regard her daughter lying still in the dark bedroom: ferocious, pitiless as Arcturus.

“Life goes on.” It was one of Edie’s favorite sayings. It was a lie. These were the days when Charlotte still woke in a drugged delirium to get her dead son up for school, when she started from bed five and six times a night calling his name. And sometimes, for a moment or two, she believed that Robin was upstairs and it was all a bad dream. But when her eyes adjusted to the dark, and the hideous despairing litter (tissues, pill bottles, dead flower petals) strewn across the bed table, she began to sob again—though she had sobbed until her ribcage ached—because Robin wasn’t upstairs or any place he’d ever come back from again.

He’d stuck cards in the spokes of his bicycle. Though she hadn’t realized it when he was alive, it was by their rattle that she’d kept track of his comings and goings. Some child in the neighborhood had a bicycle that sounded exactly like it and every time she heard it in the distance her heart vaulted up for a soaring, incredulous, gorgeously cruel moment.

Had he called for her? To think about his last moments was soul-destroying and yet she could think of nothing else. How long? Had he suffered? All day long she stared at the
bedroom ceiling until the shadows slid across it, and then she lay awake and stared at the glow of the luminescent clock-dial in the darkness.

“You’re not doing anybody in the world any good lying in the bed crying all day,” said Edie briskly. “You’d feel a lot better if you put on some clothes and went and had your hair fixed.”

In dreams he was evasive and distant, withholding something. She longed for some word from him but he never met her eyes, never spoke. Libby, in the worst days, had murmured something to her over and over again, something that she hadn’t understood.
We were never meant to have him, darling. He wasn’t ours to keep. We were lucky he was with us for as long as he was
.

And this was the thought that came to Charlotte, through a narcotic fog, that hot morning in the shuttered room. That what Libby had told her was the truth. And that, in some strange way or other, ever since he was just a baby, Robin had been trying to say goodbye to her all his life.

————

Edie was the last person to see him. No one was too clear after that. As her family talked in the living room—longer silences now, everyone glancing around pleasantly, waiting for the call to go to table—Charlotte was on her hands and knees rummaging through the dining-room buffet for her good linen napkins (she’d come in to find the table set with everyday cotton; Ida—typically—claimed never to have heard of the others, said the checked picnic napkins were the only ones she could find). Charlotte had just found the good napkins, and was about to call out to Ida (
see? right where I said they were
) when she was struck by the conviction that something was wrong.

The baby
. It was her first instinct. She jumped up, letting the napkins fall on the rug, and ran out onto the porch.

But Harriet was fine. Still strapped in her swing, she stared at her mother with big grave eyes. Allison sat on the sidewalk, thumb in mouth. She was rocking back and forth,
making a wasplike, humming sound—unharmed, apparently, but Charlotte saw that she’d been crying.

What’s the matter? said Charlotte. Did you hurt yourself?

But Allison, thumb still in mouth, shook her head no.

From the corner of her eye, Charlotte saw a flash of movement at the yard’s edge—Robin? But when she looked up, nobody was there.

Are you sure? she said to Allison. Did the kitty scratch you?

Allison shook her head no. Charlotte knelt and checked her over quickly; no bumps, no bruises. The cat had disappeared.

Still uneasy, Charlotte kissed Allison on the forehead and led her into the house (“Why don’t you go see what Ida’s doing in the kitchen, honey?”) and then went back out for the baby. She had felt these dreamlike flashes of panic before, usually in the middle of the night and always when a child was less than six months old, bolting upright from a sound sleep to rush to the crib. But Allison wasn’t hurt, and the baby was fine.… She went into the living room and deposited Harriet with her aunt Adelaide, picked up the napkins on the dining-room rug, and—still half-sleepwalking, she didn’t know why—trailed into the kitchen to get the baby’s jar of apricots.

Her husband, Dix, had said not to wait supper. He was out duck-hunting. That was fine. When Dix wasn’t at the bank, he was usually out hunting or over at his mother’s house. She pushed open the kitchen doors and dragged a stool over to get the baby’s apricots from the cabinet. Ida Rhew was bending low, pulling a pan of rolls from the oven.
God
, sang a cracking Negro voice from the transistor radio.
God don’t never change
.

That gospel program. It was something that haunted Charlotte, though she’d never mentioned it to anyone. If Ida hadn’t had that racket turned up so loud they might have heard what was going on in the yard, might have known that something was wrong. But then (tossing in her bed at night, trying restlessly to trace events to a possible First Cause) it was she who had made pious Ida work on Sunday in the first
place.
Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
. Jehovah in the Old Testament was always smiting people down for far less.

These rolls is nearly done, Ida Rhew said, stooping to the oven again.

Ida, I’ll get those. I think it’s about to rain. Why don’t you bring the clothes in and call Robin to supper.

When Ida—grouchy and stiff—creaked back in with an armload of white shirts, she said: He won’t come.

You tell him to get in here this minute.

I don’t know where he is. I done called half a dozen times.

Maybe he’s across the street.

Ida dropped the shirts in the ironing basket. The screen door banged shut.
Robin
, Charlotte heard her yell.
You come on, or I’ll switch your legs
.

And then, again:
Robin!

But Robin didn’t come.

Oh, for Heaven’s sake, said Charlotte, drying her hands on a kitchen towel, and went out into the yard.

Once she was there she realized, with a slight unease that was more irritation than anything else, that she had no idea where to look. His bicycle was leaning against the porch. He knew not to wander off so close to dinnertime, especially when they had company.

Robin!
she called. Was he hiding? No children his age lived in the neighborhood, and though every now and then unkempt children—black and white—wandered up from the river to the wide, oak-shaded sidewalks of George Street, she didn’t see any of them now. Ida forbade him to play with them, though sometimes he did anyway. The smallest ones were pitiful, with their scabbed knees and dirty feet; though Ida Rhew shooed them roughly from the yard, Charlotte, in tender-hearted moods, sometimes gave them quarters or glasses of lemonade. But when they grew older—thirteen or fourteen—she was glad to retreat into the house and allow Ida to be as fierce as she liked in chasing them away. They shot BB guns at dogs, stole things from people’s porches, used bad language, and ran the streets till all hours of the night.

Ida said: Some of them trashy little boys was running down the street a while ago.

When Ida said trashy, she meant white. Ida hated the poor white children and blamed them with unilateral ferocity for all yard mishaps, even those with which Charlotte was certain they could have had nothing possibly to do.

Was Robin with them? said Charlotte.

Nome.

Where are they now?

I run them off.

Which way?

Yunder towards the depot.

Old Mrs. Fountain from next door, in her white cardigan and harlequin glasses, had come out into her yard to see what was happening. Close behind was her decrepit poodle, Mickey, with whom she shared a comical resemblance: sharp nose, stiff gray curls, suspicious thrust of chin.

Well, she called gaily. Yall having a big party over there?

Just the family, Charlotte called back, scanning the darkening horizon behind Natchez Street where the train tracks stretched flat in the distance. She should have invited Mrs. Fountain to dinner. Mrs. Fountain was a widow, and her only child had died in the Korean War, but she was a complainer and a vicious busybody. Mr. Fountain, who ran a dry-cleaning business, had died fairly young, and people joked that she had talked him into the ground.