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Authors: Donna Tartt

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BOOK: The Little Friend
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Harriet spent entire days studying the old photograph album at Edie’s house (which, a far cry from Tribulation, was a two bedroom bungalow built in the 1940s). There was thin, shy Libby, hair scraped back, looking colorless and spinsterly even at eighteen: there was something of Harriet’s mother (and of Allison) about her mouth and eyes. Next, scornful Edie—nine years old, brow like a thundercloud, her expression a small replica of her father the Judge who frowned behind her. A strange, moon-faced Tat, sprawled in a wicker chair, the blurred shadow of a kitten in her lap, unrecognizable. Baby Adelaide, who would outlive three husbands, laughing at the camera. She was the prettiest of the four and there was something about her too which reminded one of Allison but something petulant was already gathering at the corners of her mouth. On the steps of the doomed house towering behind them were the Dutch tiles reading CLEVE: only just detectable, and only then if you were looking hard, but they were the one thing in the photograph which remained unchanged.

The photographs Harriet loved most were those with her brother in them. Edie had taken most of them; because they were so hard to look at, they’d been removed from the album
and were kept separately, on a shelf in Edie’s closet inside a heart-shaped chocolate box. When Harriet stumbled upon them, when she was eight or so, it was an archaeological find equivalent to the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb.

Edie had no idea that Harriet had found the pictures, and that they were one of the primary reasons Harriet spent so much time at her house. Harriet, equipped with a flashlight, studied them while sitting in the back of Edie’s musty-smelling closet behind the skirts of Edie’s Sunday dresses; sometimes she slipped the box inside her Barbie travelling case and carried it out to Edie’s tool shed, where Edie—glad to have Harriet out of her hair—allowed her to play undisturbed. Several times she had carried the photographs home overnight. Once, after their mother had gone to bed, she had shown them to Allison. “Look,” she said. “That’s our brother.”

Allison, an expression of something very like fear dawning on her face, stared at the open box which Harriet had placed on her lap.

“Go ahead. Look. You’re in some of them.”

“I don’t want to,” said Allison, and jammed the lid on the box and shoved it back at Harriet.

The snapshots were in color: faded Polaroids with pinked edges, sticky and torn where they’d been pulled from the album. They were smeared with fingerprints, as if someone had handled them a lot. Some of the photographs had black catalog numbers stamped on the backs because they had been used in the police investigation, and these had the most fingerprints of all.

Harriet never tired of looking at them. The washes were too blue, unearthly; and the colors had become even stranger and more tremulous with age. The dream-lit world they provided her a glimpse of was magical, self-contained, irretrievable. There was Robin, napping with his orange kitten Weenie; clattering around on Tribulation’s grand, columned porch, sputtering with laughter, shouting at the camera; blowing bubbles with a saucer of soap and a spool. There he was, serious, in striped pyjamas; in his Cub Scout uniform—knees thrown back, pleased with himself; here he was much smaller, dressed for a kindergarten play—
The Gingerbread
Man
—in which he had portrayed a greedy crow. The costume he’d worn was famous. Libby had spent weeks making it: a black leotard, worn with orange stockings, sewn from wrist to armpit and from armpit to top of thigh with wings of feathered black velvet. Over his nose was tied a cone of orange cardboard for a beak. It was such a beautiful costume that Robin had worn it for two Halloweens running, as had his sisters, and all these years later, Charlotte still got calls from neighborhood mothers begging to borrow it for their children.

Edie had snapped a whole roll of film the night of the play: various shots of Robin running exhilarated throughout the house, arms flapping, wings billowed behind him, a stray feather or two drifting to the vast, threadbare carpet. Black wing flung around the neck of shy Libby, the blushing seamstress. With his little friends Alex (a baker, in white coat and cap) and bad Pemberton, the Gingerbread Man himself, his small face dark with rage at the indignity of his costume. Robin again, impatient, wriggling, held still by his kneeling mother as she tried to dash a comb through his hair. The playful young woman in the picture was undeniably Harriet’s mother, but a mother she had never known: airy, charming, sparkling with life.

The pictures enchanted Harriet. More than anything, she wanted to slip out of the world she knew into their cool blue-washed clarity, where her brother was alive and the beautiful house still stood and everyone was always happy. Robin and Edie in the great, gloomy parlor, the two of them on their hands and knees playing a board game—she couldn’t tell what, some game with bright counters and a colored wheel that spun. There they were again, Robin with his back to the camera tossing Edie a fat red ball and Edie rolling her eyes comically as she dove to catch it. There he was blowing out the candles in his birthday cake—nine candles, the last birthday he would ever see—with Edie and Allison leaning over his shoulder to help him, smiling faces ablaze in the dark. Adelirium of Christmases: pine boughs and tinsel, presents spilling from beneath the tree, the sideboard twinkling with cut-glass punchbowl, with crystal dishes of candy and oranges and
sugar-dusted cakes on silver platters, the fireplace seraphim garlanded with holly and everybody laughing and the chandelier blazing in the high mirrors. In the background, on the holiday table, Harriet could just make out the famous Christmas dishes: wreathed with a pattern of scarlet ribbon, jingling sleigh bells chased in gold leaf. They’d been shattered in the move—the movers had packed them badly—and nothing remained of them now but a couple of saucers and a gravy boat but there they all were in the photograph, heavenly, glorious, a complete set.

Harriet herself had been born before Christmas, in the middle of a snowstorm that was the biggest on record in Mississippi. There was a picture of this snowfall in the heart-shaped box: Tribulation’s alley of oaks bright with ice and Bounce, Adelaide’s long-dead terrier, dashing down the snow-covered walk mad with excitement, towards his mistress the photographer, caught forever in mid-bark—his tiny legs a blur, kicking a froth of snow behind him—in the moment of glorious anticipation before he reached his beloved. In the distance, the front door of Tribulation was thrown open and Robin, his timid sister Allison clinging to his waist, was waving joyously at the viewer. He was waving at Adelaide—who had snapped the picture—and at Edie, who was helping his mother out of the car; and at his baby sister Harriet, whom he had never seen before, and who was being brought home from the hospital for the first time on this snowy bright Christmas Eve.

Harriet had seen snow only twice, but all her life she knew that she had been born in it. Every Christmas Eve (smaller, sadder Christmases now, gathered around a gas heater in Libby’s stuffy little low-ceilinged house, drinking eggnog) Libby and Tat and Adelaide told the same story, the story of how they’d packed into Edie’s car and driven over to the hospital in Vicksburg to bring Harriet home in the snow.

“You were the best Christmas present we ever had,” they said. “Robin was so excited. The night before we went to get you he could hardly sleep, he kept your grandmother awake until four in the morning. And the first time he saw you, when we brought you inside, he was quiet for a minute and then he
said, ‘Mother, you must have picked out the prettiest baby they had.’ ”

“Harriet was such a good baby,” said Harriet’s mother wistfully—seated by the heater, clasping her knees. Like Robin’s birthday and the anniversary of his death, Christmas was especially hard for her and everyone knew it.

“Was I good?”

“Yes, you were, darling.” It was true. Harriet had never cried or given anyone a moment of trouble before she had learned how to talk.

Harriet’s favorite picture in the heart-shaped box, which she studied by flashlight again and again, was of her and Robin and Allison in the parlor of Tribulation, beside the Christmas tree. It was the only picture, so far as she knew, of the three of them together; it was the only picture of herself which had been taken in her family’s old house. It communicated no sense whatever of the many dooms which were about to fall. The old Judge would be gone in a month, Tribulation would be lost forever and Robin would die in the spring but of course nobody had known that then; it was Christmas, there was a new baby in the house, everybody was happy and thought they would be happy forever.

In the photograph, Allison (grave in her white nightgown) stood barefoot beside Robin, who was holding baby Harriet—his expression a mixture of excitement and bewilderment, as if Harriet was a fancy toy he wasn’t quite sure how to handle. The Christmas tree sparkled beside them; peeking sweetly from the corner of the photograph were Robin’s cat Weenie and inquisitive Bounce, like the beasts come to witness the miracle in the stables. Above the scene the marble seraphim smiled. The light in the photograph was fractured, sentimental, incandescent with disaster. Even Bounce the terrier would be dead by the next Christmas.

————

After Robin’s death, the First Baptist Church started a collection for a gift in his memory—a Japanese quince, or perhaps new cushions for the church pews—but more money poured in than anyone had expected. One of the church’s six
stained-glass windows—each depicting a scene from the life of Christ—had been shattered by a tree branch during a winter storm, and boarded up with plywood ever since. The pastor, who had despaired over the cost of replacing it, suggested using the money to buy a new one.

A considerable portion of the fund had come from the town’s schoolchildren. They had gone door to door, organized raffles and bake sales. Robin’s friend Pemberton Hull (who had played the Gingerbread Man to Robin’s blackbird in the kindergarten play) had given close to two hundred dollars to the memorial for his dead friend, a largesse which nine-year-old Pem claimed to have obtained by smashing his piggy bank but which he had actually stolen from his grandmother’s purse. (He had also attempted to contribute his mother’s engagement ring, ten silver teaspoons, and a Masonic tie tack whose origins no one was able to determine; it was set with diamonds and evidently worth some money.) But even without these handsome bequests, the total sum brought in by Robin’s classmates amounted to quite a lot; and it was suggested, instead of replacing the broken portrayal of the Wedding at Cana with the same scene, that something be done to honor not only Robin but the children who had worked so hard for him.

The new window—unveiled, to the gasps of the First Baptist congregation, a year and a half later—depicted a pleasant blue-eyed Jesus seated on a boulder beneath an olive tree and involved in conversation with a red-haired boy in a baseball cap who bore an unmistakable resemblance to Robin.

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME

ran the inscription beneath the scene, and, engraved on a plaque beneath:

In Loving Memory of Robin Cleve Dufresnes
From the Schoolchildren of Alexandria, Mississippi
“For Theirs Shall Be the Kingdom of Heaven”

For all her life, Harriet had seen her brother ablaze in the same constellation as the archangel Gabriel, Saint John the Baptist, Joseph and Mary and of course Christ himself. The
noonday sun streamed through his exalted form; and the purified outlines of his face (bobbed nose, elfin smile) shone with the same beatific clarity. It was a clarity all the more radiant for being childish, more vulnerable than John the Baptist and the others; yet in his small face too was the serene indifference of eternity, like a secret they all shared.

What exactly happened at Calvary, or in the grave? How did flesh ascend from lowliness and sorrow into this kaleidoscope of resurrection? Harriet didn’t know. But Robin knew, and the secret glowed in his transfigured face.

Christ’s own passage—aptly—was described as a Mystery, yet people were queerly uninterested in getting to the bottom of it. What exactly did the Bible mean when it said that Jesus rose from the dead? Had He returned only in spirit, an unsatisfactory spook of some sort? Apparently not, according to the Bible: Doubting Thomas had put a finger in one of the nail holes in His palm; He had been spotted, solid enough, on the road to Emmaus; He had even eaten a little snack over at one of the disciples’ houses. But if He had in fact risen from the dead in His earthly body, where was He now? And if He loved everybody as much as He claimed to, why then did anybody ever die at all?

When Harriet was about seven or eight, she had gone to the library in town and asked for some books on magic. But when she got them home, she was enraged to discover that they contained only tricks: balls disappearing from under cups, quarters dropping from people’s ears. Opposite the window which depicted Jesus and her brother was a scene of Lazarus raised from the dead. Over and over again, Harriet read the story about Lazarus in the Bible, but it refused to address even the most basic questions. What had Lazarus to say to Jesus and his sisters about his week in the grave? Did he still smell? Was he able to go back home and carry on living with his sisters, or was he frightening to the people around him and perhaps had to go off somewhere and live by himself like Frankenstein’s monster? She could not help thinking that if she, Harriet, had been there, she would have had more to say on the subject than Saint Luke did.

Perhaps it was all a story. Perhaps Jesus himself hadn’t
risen from the dead, though everyone said He had; but if indeed He had rolled the stone away and stepped living from the grave why then not her brother, whom she saw every Sunday blazing by His side?

This was Harriet’s greatest obsession, and the one from which all the others sprang. For what she wanted—more than Tribulation, more than anything—was to have her brother back. Next to that, she wanted to find out who killed him.

————

On a Friday morning in May, twelve years after Robin’s murder, Harriet was sitting at Edie’s kitchen table reading the journals of Captain Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic. The book was propped open between her elbow and a plate from which she was eating a scrambled egg and some toast. She and Allison often ate their breakfast at Edie’s house on school mornings. Ida Rhew, who did all the cooking, did not arrive at work until eight o’clock and their mother, who seldom ate much of anything anyway, had only a cigarette and occasionally a bottle of Pepsi for breakfast.

BOOK: The Little Friend
12.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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