Katherine didn’t have the things to do that a normal bride would. She was dismantling a life, not assembling one. She began to clean her house, trying to separate the impersonal, constant landscape from its intimate occupants. Bravely entering the house every morning she would think of what a simple task this was: papers would be packed, and clothing and books and knickknacks, while furniture could stay. The garden hose belonged to the house, but all the envelopes of unplanted seeds were her own legacy. The heavy armoire stayed but her little chest of drawers with the crudely painted morning glory trim was coming with her. Every day by lunchtime her belief in the simplicity of the task was defeated again. She wondered more and more often, always with a childish sense of the wrongness of the thought, why she couldn’t just stay in her house. Either that or walk away and leave it holding its breath, preserving the warm spaces between things, in the hopes that she’d return. The pools of light from the library’s lamps would reappear every night and fade away every morning, like moons. She put off packing and contented herself with emptying one room at a time, herding everything into a narrowing space. Downstairs it became difficult to walk. End tables and rocking chairs stood in the hallway, the library’s books moved out of the shelves into boxes that stood everywhere stacked in twos and threes, their flaps unsealed, where she tripped over them. Charles came one afternoon and stood silently in the kitchen, amid nested saucepans and piles of plates and appliances that covered the counters and much of the floor. She had emptied all the cabinets, to see what there was. This house held a past version of himself he particularly cherished, to which no witnesses survived apart from these rooms. Whole decades of his life belonged to a time he could never discuss with her, not merely because she hadn’t shared them but because the child she had been inevitably appeared at the periphery of his memory, as self-contained and solemn as an animal, dragging her doll across the room, sitting in the privacy of a shrub, and newly shocked him. He disliked what she was doing. Left alone, the house could contain the events of countless lifetimes invisibly, but now she’d kicked up all that sediment. And the house reminded them of something else that made them angry at each other. “Do you need any help here?” he asked when she came into the kitchen, wearing a huge old shirt he recognized instantly as having been her father’s.
“No.” She knew he didn’t want to be here while she did this.
“Have you written your mother yet?”
All the while that she worked, she was afflicted with this letter to her mother. Her mind produced incessant variations and nothing that she thought of drowned them out. I suppose this is the one thing you always feared most; I suppose this is the one thing I needed to do before you would forgive me; Dear Mother; Dear Mommy; Dear Glee.
“No,” she said. She wiped her hands on her shirt and left the room again.
The day she saw Chang at services she had finally stopped putting it off. Her mortification desperately needed some show of resolve to obscure it, and she marched back to her house in the afternoon, both ashamed of herself for what she’d said to him, and newly determined. She found her writing things sitting in the top of an unsealed box, her old blotter rolled up and her pen in its scratched metal case. She picked her way up the stairs through dust-filled cones of light to her bare, freshly dusted desk, in a room otherwise occupied now only by a stripped bed and an unwashed set of curtains floating gently in the breeze from the window, and wrote out the letter. It did not come as close as possible to expressing her actual feelings. She suspected it came nowhere near. She wrote what occurred to her, abandoning all her plans for eloquence, afraid that if she paused she’d lose her nerve. She abandoned “The art of the letter is not about expression, but persuasion.” This was something her mother had taught her. Lead with your wrists when you dance. Never sound opinionated, only amused and indulgent. Carry your rib cage as high as you can and you’ll look twice as slender. The loss of her mother rose up from where she tried to keep it, delimited but in no way diminished. She had been her mother’s only daughter, and yet they had each failed to experience this bond. She wrote, “I’m not proud of my various failures. I have been a bad daughter, a bad student, a bad example of the independent woman. I have never been independent at all.” What was more selfish, to struggle ineffectually against the tide, or to try and find a way to make it carry you forward, no matter how harmful a force it might seem? The cliché made her cringe but she didn’t try to do better. Clichés were one of the worst sorts of truth and it was this category, the category of lousy, hackneyed truths, that she now occupied. The more she savaged herself as she wrote, the more confident she became that she was reporting plain facts. She was weak, she lacked courage, she lacked imagination. Her entire life exemplified the failure of imagination. Her situation was only redeemed by the fact that she had recognized it, and also recognized that truths could not be forced into existence out of hopes; they had to be found, scattered where they were, camouflaged to fit the background of the unremarkable. The truth was puny and disappointing but it was there. It didn’t send you borrowing against the ungenerous future. She went back downstairs and pulled a bloom off the coral honeysuckle. “Here is one of your bright flowers,” she finished, putting the flower in the envelope. She remembered her mother standing in the kitchen, wrists propped on her hips because her hands were still wet from the dishes, watching a hummingbird bounce through those flowers. “Look at this!” she’d cried. “Look at this cute little thing!”
It wasn’t until after she’d mailed the letter that she imagined her mother receiving it. She would stride out to the postbox with a glass of iced tea for the mailman. Katherine remembered her embarrassment at this habit of her mother’s, to lie in wait for the mailman and ambush him with talk and refreshment. Glee would prop an elbow between the spears of the black iron fence and toy with the hedge or tap her foot restlessly on the flagstones until the mailman had finished his drink, as if she were the one who’d been waylaid. Beyond this Katherine did not know what would happen. The letter now seemed vulgar, even insane. Each moment she had imagined as a final threshold had only complicated her emotions. She began to wait for the mailman herself, going repeatedly to the front windows all morning until she saw his car inching up to her house, and as soon as he’d passed out of sight she practically ran down the drive. She was disappointed every day that she found nothing, but also relieved. Perhaps her mother had thrown the letter away without opening it. Perhaps her mother was more offended by having been told than she would have been if Katherine had left her in peace. Katherine had always associated such maddening issues of protocol with her mother, and her mother’s stringent, elaborate, always-disappointed expectations.
Then she received her reply. When she saw the envelope lying by itself in the shadows of the mailbox, the same pale blue engraved kind her mother had used ever since Katherine could remember, since she was a little girl and had thought her mother’s writing table was an inexhaustibly interesting place to play, she started to cry. She stood at the end of her front walk, in her bare feet and the big man’s shirt, which was thoroughly filthy, crying. She wiped her face on her sleeve and looked up the walk at her house, seeing it the way she might have seen it if she had gone away for decades and finally returned, to be amazed by the smallness of the closets she had once hidden in, and the shabbiness of everything. She had wanted Chang to say No, don’t get married, don’t be stupid, pack a bag and meet me later, when everybody is asleep. And how often did that happen? He had come from a distant land, and to her that was lighter than air. He always looked as if he’d briefly dropped out of an airplane, standing thin and transient in his dark suit, a glaring interruption in the background of the unremarkable. She had wanted to step inside that circle. And now here was the letter, ratifying her engagement. That sleek pastel square could not possibly contain anything but bland, unaffected acquiescence. She had wanted outrage, dispute, something that she had to fight against. She did not know how else to be sure of herself. She finally reached for the letter and realized she didn’t recognize the hand.
Inside she mixed herself a drink. This was another imitation of her mother, complete with the haughty face which was supposed to conceal how eager she was to be drunk. Katherine sipped her drink haughtily, raising her eyebrows very slightly as it hit her. Then she slit open the envelope. There was the violet-pattern envelope lining, and the fussy notepaper. The letter was from a person named Mary Frances, who identified herself as the housekeeper, and it said, in a sloppy hand which Katherine immediately saw as evidence of carelessness, that Mrs. Monroe was much too sick right now to feel like bothering with composing a letter and wanted to know (“Mrs. Monroe is dictating this”) if Katherine couldn’t come down to New Orleans and talk about things face to face.
She lay the letter down and finished her drink. Then she poured herself a fresh one and went to the telephone. When the woman answered she said, “Who is this?”
“This is Mary Frances,” the woman drawled carelessly. “Who is this?”
“How is Mrs. Monroe today?”
“She’s sleeping. I don’t think I heard your name.”
“This is her daughter, Katherine.”
“Oh,” the woman said, in a tone that managed to be both obsequious and insinuating. “Shall I go tell her you’re on the line?”
“Absolutely not. When she wakes up you tell her I’m coming down and that I’d like her to fire you. I’ll be there tomorrow at lunchtime.”
The woman laughed heartily. “Oh, she said you’re a firebrand.” She kept laughing.
“Will you tell her what I said?”
“Sure I will. She likes me, though.” The woman’s unconcerned laughter made Katherine bristle. She hung up and started to pack.
Mary Frances had positioned herself to be lavishly framed by the front porch wisteria, and had been there since the earliest limit of what could be interpreted as lunchtime, so that when Katherine arrived she was not even able to sit in the car for a while being shocked by the unchanged face of the house, serene beneath the murky yellow heat. During the drive the possibility that Glee was going to die had elevated Katherine into the realm of abstract catastrophe, but now that she had raced to this place, accomplishing her one clear imperative, the particularity of her situation overwhelmed her. After several seconds of intensely hating the person who must be Mary Frances, she decided she was glad for the distraction. As she came tottering up the walk with her bags Mary Frances called out, “I’m afraid I’m still here, Miss Monroe.”
The house was full of newly cultivated prettiness that signified the departures of children, and widowhood. The rooms had new rugs on the floors that replicated real Victorian rugs from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. Katherine was relieved to find at least the inside of the house this strange and standoffish. But the big bay window at the back of the parlor stood open, and the smell of honeysuckle came in, along with the more rancid scent of the magnolia petals that lay bruised and rotten all over the walkways like bleached banana peels. The garden smell overpowered her with its absolute sameness, which cut across everything. She stood behind Mary Frances, enduring the assault of Mary Frances’s disquisition on the recent renovations only because Mary Frances was mostly addressing herself to the walls, which had been newly papered. She had not missed the implication in Mary Frances’s exhaustive inventory, that this lovely project, which she, Mary Frances, had been thrilled to have a hand in, was the kind of thing a mother generally got help in from her daughter. Mary Frances had not offered to take her bags. Katherine put the bags down on the Smithsonian carpet and then she smelled a cigarette and heard her mother’s voice say, “There you are, Kitty. Katherine.” Her mother had come halfway downstairs and stood supporting herself on the banister with the heel of one hand, and holding her cigarette pinched between two fingers. Her hair was a fine, iridescent cloud around her head.
“I’ve been showing her the changes, Mrs. Monroe.”
“I could hear you.” Glee pulled carefully on her cigarette and released a thread of smoke. Her whole diminished figure was an otherworldly yellow, the shade of buttermilk. Her nails were unpainted and this made the hands look young and unfinished, except for the marblelike knuckles. “I thought over what you said, Katherine, but I can’t let Mary Frances go because she remembers every word that I say. Isn’t that a rare thing? I believe there are the makings of a cold lunch in the icebox which you could begin to assemble, Mary Frances. Unless Katherine has eaten in some colorful roadside café.”
When Mary Frances was gone Katherine said, “She made me think you were very sick.”
“Try not to look so disappointed. I knew you wouldn’t come if I just asked.”
“I certainly would have come, if you’d asked. You only ever needed to ask.”
“That’s very Katherine. I know you are completely reasonable so long as everybody else is. We only need to be reasonable, isn’t that right? That’s what you’re waiting for. Reasonableness.” This announcement exhausted her. “I thought I would appeal to your dramatic sensibility. Katherine Nightingale speeds to the rescue. I thought it was very sweet that you tried to fire Mary Frances. But she is my Boswell. I must have her follow me around or I wouldn’t be sure I existed.”
When they were sitting at lunch Glee said, “Shall I tell you how we live here, these days? I rise with the birds and Mary Frances and I take a turn in the garden before it gets hot. You are welcome to join in with us if you’re up but you shouldn’t feel bad if you’re not. I hardly sleep anymore and Mary Frances must catch her rest when I don’t need her. Then I rest until lunchtime. We usually eat lunch around noon. We waited this meal for you. After lunch we do the mail and then I take more rest. We eat supper whenever it gets dark because the heat kills my appetite. If that doesn’t suit you Mary Frances can fix you something earlier, but you need to tell her after lunch because in the afternoons I generally let her go have her fun. You’re in your old room. You ought to feel free to do as you please. Mary Frances will find you a map if you don’t remember your way around town. They’ve put some new roads in but all the old ones are still there.”
“I don’t think I’ll want to go out.”
“That’s fine.”
“Don’t you want to talk with me?”
“Yes I do, Katherine. I will speak to you tonight after supper.”
“What are you doing until then?”
“I just told you, didn’t I? We are busy all day until then.” She watched her mother stalk slowly out of the dining room and back up the stairs, with her poker-stiff back and one hand squeezing dents in Mary Frances’s upper arm.
Mary Frances had succeeded to the position of mailman-ambassadrix. After taking Glee upstairs she established herself in one of the grapevine rockers beneath the porch wisteria, and when the mailman arrived she advanced partway down the walk and let him meet her there. It seemed that he no longer got a refreshment. Katherine watched the transaction through the French window in her old room. When Mary Frances had released the mailman and come back indoors with her precious cargo Katherine pushed the window open and stepped onto the second-story porch. There were no chairs here. She could see in the fine clay-colored layer of dust on the boards the marks that a rainstorm had left. There were bits of acorn from the spreading oak that shadowed the front garden and reached over the ironwork fence to lock its branches with the trees that lined the street. This porch did not seem to be used anymore. In her childhood it had been the children’s porch, where they were allowed to sit up past their bedtime on party nights, with their radio playing very quietly, slurping important-looking drinks full of ice cubes and food dye. Glee would leave her guests to come and drop a sprig of mint in each of their glasses and kiss them goodnight, smelling strongly of lilac perfume and cosmetic powder, her eyes and lips standing out startlingly. Below them, on the lower porch, the laughter grew more riotous as the hush in the street deepened. From the upper porch there was a patch of sky visible between the trees where they could see the constellations turning by, and understand how late it really was. Katherine had been five or six then. She could remember the soft hiss of the radio, a universe of desolated space trapped inside that sturdy box.
She could hear Mary Frances reading the mail to her mother. If she had crawled quietly down the length of the porch she could have looked into her mother’s curtained room. But her mother had turned her depletion into a regime, and this made the house a place of muffled chambers divided by impenetrable barriers, linked by very few gates that opened up only at designated hours. Everything breathed the grim determination to make privacy, and although Mary Frances’s voice carried easily through the thin walls, emoting luncheon invitations, thank-you notes, appeals from genteel charities, Katherine felt the repellent force of her mother’s room. This was a good sign, if it meant her own room would be treated with the same fanatical formality. Where her mother had once expressed herself with unrestrained intrusions into the world’s business, she now expressed herself with empresslike indifference. As it turned out, Katherine was never called to dinner. She ventured downstairs as soon as it was dark enough to have to light the lamps, and the meal was being laid out, just as she’d been told.
Once they were seated Glee held her fork with the tines curving down and pushed her food into neat configurations on her plate. When she wasn’t doing this she reached for her cigarette. “You’re still looking pretty and thin,” she said. “Although someone has laid siege to your hair.”
“I cut it.”
“What for? Were you in a renunciatory mood?”
“It’s not that short.”
“You always did veer unpredictably between hedonism and renunciation. Do you know what Mary Frances said to me yesterday after you called?”
“I don’t see how I could.”
“She said she thought you were drunk.”
“I was.”
“And I said, ‘Oh, no, Katherine would never get drunk. She has been living like a Jesuit for years, denying herself all the pleasures of normal human intercourse. If she’s drunk things are looking very up or very down.’”
“I was packing up the house and getting ready to move.”
Glee ignored the obvious meaning of this statement. “That reminds me of some business I want to discuss with you.” Glee spoke in a condescendingly indulgent tone, as if Katherine were a coed on vacation from her first term at college and afflicted with the false impression that she had grown up. “Daddy and I bought a house down on the coast after we stopped going up to Sewanee, but then we hardly used it at all. It was a very cute place, and the doctors thought the Gulf air would be good for your father but of course they were wrong about that.” She reached for her cigarette and came back with nothing but the foul-smelling, smoldering filter. “Call Mary Frances.”
“Why?”
“Because I need a cigarette.”
“I can get your cigarette for you.”
“No. Mary Frances will do it.”
“Why do you need to bother Mary Frances when I’m perfectly able to stand up and get you your cigarette?”
“Don’t start in with me, Katherine. I’ve invited you beneath my roof. Don’t you start in with me.”
“I need to talk to you,” Katherine said, ignoring Mary Frances’s grin when she entered the room.
“You’ll talk when I’m finished. I told you I had business to discuss.” Glee broke off as Mary Frances lit her a fresh cigarette. “Do you know what I think, Mary Frances? I think I’ve eaten about as much as I want. Now this little house, none of your brothers want it. They all have their own summer houses. I suppose this little house is too plain and inconspicuous for them. As I recall, it’s just an unpainted place on the channel, with a fishing dock and a porch. You can hardly see it until you’re practically on top of it. That’s the sort of place I prefer, a natural-looking place that does not sit lording it over the beauty of its location, but your brothers are all married to women who find my simple tastes rather dowdy and laughable. Do you know your brothers’ wives?”
“No, Mother. You’ve told them all I was cheap.”
“I told them no such thing. You never did get very close with your brothers, did you? I would have thought that would be a girl’s dream come true, to have so many handsome big brothers. But you never seemed to feel that way. I adore my boys but every single one of them has married the same sort of striving, showy, strong-headed girl.”
“That’s a strange coincidence.”
“I think it’s very sad, myself. But my concern is with this little house. Your brothers have all been out to see it because I offered to give it to them first, for a fishing camp or something fun like that, and they say it has grown derelict from the damp and the last hurricane and that I ought to tear it down and sell the lot.”
“Maybe you ought to do that.”
“I don’t want to do that. I have a strong attachment to that house. After your father and I stopped going to Sewanee I felt as though the best part of my life had died. That was a terrible loss. And then we found this place and something about it fit around us like the shell around the egg. I think your brothers said it was in terrible shape so that I’d feel less bad they weren’t taking it from me, but I want to see for myself.”
“Why? What will that accomplish?”
“‘Why?’” Glee repeated, derisively. “I have things I need to settle, and this is one of them. I’d like to see it settled right.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“Do you think we are all gathered here to devote ourselves to you? Do you think that your so-called engagement is at the center of my thoughts every minute? I have a world of concerns, Katherine. I will address your particular one when I’m able.”
“Then what am I doing here? You lured me with a pile of nonsense about being so ill you couldn’t pick up a pen.”
“Do I look well to you?” Glee cried out.
“No,” she said, after a moment.
“I’m going to die, Kitty. Katherine. I’m going to die and it’s going to be pretty soon.” She snatched her napkin out of her lap and wiped her eyes. “Oh, goddamn you to hell! You make me so angry.”
“You are not going to die.”
“Oh, yes I am.”
“Don’t let me hear things like this,” Katherine said gently.
“Doctor will be here tomorrow for his weekly look-at-me-and-lie. You ask him when I’m in the next room. He’ll level with you. I told him you were coming. I told him my daughter was coming to help out her mama.”
“I will help you.”
“I think I’ll go to bed now.” Glee wrapped her hand around the back of the chair and pulled herself rigidly upright. “Call Mary Frances for me.” She was completely composed again.
“I thought you wanted to talk after supper.”
“I didn’t foresee we’d speak so much during supper,” Glee said.
Doctor came. He was young and handsome, animated right out of the bright new wallpaper-background of the renovated unremarkable. With one glance at him Katherine could see all the ways in which Glee would complain about him later. Glee became spirited and uncooperative—“Oh, no you don’t!” she cried when he brought out the stethoscope. She batted a translucent hand at him. “He wants to put the cold thing on me,” she told Katherine, “when I think it’s plain to all of us standing here that my heart is still beating. Get that cold thing away.” She made Katherine hold her hand while the doctor slid the instrument under her blouse and averted his eyes. “You had better not leave me alone with this child,” she told Katherine. Katherine sensed that Mary Frances had once performed this function, but Mary Frances had been sent out of the room. “This boy is so young he retains the fraternity-house way of thinking. I’m going to send you away and ask for your father again,” she warned the doctor, who grinned appreciatively. “My father is itching to get back on his rounds,” the doctor said. “He’s so senile he forgets he’s retired. I’ll send him right to you.”
“If he knew you were talking that way about him he would whip you. Somebody ought to.” The doctor laughed, and had to take her heart rate again. Then he said, “Question time,” and Glee held up a hand.
“Kitty, go and tell Mary Frances to set up lunch in the garden. I feel like being outside.”
Katherine waited downstairs for the doctor and when he emerged they shook hands. “How sick is she?” The doctor gave her a guarded, heroic look and Katherine said, “Don’t do that, please.”
“She’s terminally ill. It’s a cancer in the marrow of her bones.”
“Will it kill her?”
“Yes. Maybe not this year.”
“But maybe this year?”
“It’s impossible to say right now. I’m not concealing anything from you. She’s in what we call remission.”
“I know what that means.”
“Then you know it could go on for a year or more or it could give way next month. Remission’s like a house of cards. You can never tell when it’s going to collapse but you know that it will.” He was packing his bag, and when he looked up again his gaze swept her. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you. I didn’t know Mrs. Monroe had a daughter.”
“They don’t talk about me since I went to prison.”
The doctor laughed loudly. Imperfectly concealed in that sound she heard Glee’s door creak open. “That’s very funny.”
“Good afternoon,” she said.
They did not have lunch outside after all. Glee took a tray in her room. She lay back on her mountain of pillows and leveled the tray with a look of disgust. Katherine moved idly around the room, fingering the curtains and the handles on the dresser. The curtains were drawn. Sometimes a puff of air forced its way in and they rose slightly. “You asked him, didn’t you?” Glee asked. “I heard him positively roaring with laughter.”
“He wasn’t laughing at that.”
“What was he laughing at, then?”
“I said you’d never told him about me because ever since I’d gone to prison the family tried not to mention me.”
“I never told him about you because my family relations are none of his business. His business is to make me get better.”
“He doesn’t seem to think he can do that.”
“Stop pacing, Katherine.”
“There are no chairs in here.”
“There are no chairs because I can’t stand people sitting in my bedroom and staring at me as if I were an invalid.”
“I’ll go, then.”
“Come back here. When are you taking me to Kingfisher’s Perch?”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“The little coast house. Your daddy and I called it Kingfisher’s Perch. When are we going there?”
“I can’t take you there, Mother.”
“Yes you can. You’re going to.”
“I have to go back to Sewanee.”
“No you don’t.”
“What do you mean, ‘No I don’t’?”
“You may think you do, but you don’t. You don’t know anything. What do you need to go back to Sewanee for, when you’ve been there for ten years doing nothing? I could not believe your father willed you that house. I begged him not to. After he died I was going to turn that house upside down and shake it until you fell out, and then it turned out he willed it to you.”
“I’m going back to Sewanee.”
“Can I say something else? I know you must think making some joke about going to prison is very witty, but it isn’t. It humiliates me. You don’t talk about my family that way, in my house. You forget that the trash you say about yourself because you lack self-respect is going to reflect upon me. I won’t have it. I won’t have your flippancy. It’s one of the ugliest things about you.”
“I’m going.” She pulled the door open and Glee said, “Kitty. I’m sorry. I know that nickname annoys you but it is carved on my heart.”
She stood a while, just breathing steadily, and crushing the doorknob in her palm. Finally she said, “What is it?”
“He told you, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Will you please take me to Kingfisher’s Perch? It is not much to ask.”
“I can take you. I only wonder why no one else could do it.”
“No one else could do it because I want you to do it.”
“All right.”
“When?”
“Soon. I can’t stay here all summer.”
“I’m certainly not asking you to. That’s settled, then. We’ll go soon.”
But then they couldn’t go soon, because Glee grew worse. The summer heat intensified, and she began to have trouble sleeping. Katherine ventured into town to shop for air conditioners. She was amazed by the sameness of New Orleans, and her own familiarity with it. At traffic lights her mind seemed to curl up behind her eyes like a cat in the sun. It could register warmth and nothing else. Then the light would turn and she would be gliding through the hostile city traffic, bumping over streetcar rails, squinting into the glare, seeing nothing. She didn’t get lost. In the first store the owner was a man slightly older than herself, fleshy and tan, with tufts of black hair coming out of his collar at the nape of his neck. He was cutting keys. When she asked if he carried air conditioners he grinned first at her breasts and then at her unjeweled hands, holding her pocketbook, and kept screaming the new key against the saw blade.
“Did you hear me?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Do you have them?”
“Don’t you like the heat?” he asked, and laughed protestingly as she left. But at the next store she found herself gamely flirting with the half circle of paunchy men who were seated talking there, on huge spools of garden hose or stacked car batteries. “Hi there, darlin’,” they said, and she smiled.
“Whose darling am I?”
“Whose do you want to be?”
“Oh, I can’t choose,” she said.
Glee rejected the air conditioner because as far as she was concerned the air that came from those machines was like the breath of the dead, and so Katherine went back to the store and bought a pair of oscillating fans, and these sat on either side of Glee’s bed like sentinels, humming night and day, endlessly scanning the room. To avoid the ubiquitous ears of Mary Frances, Katherine called Charles from the pay phone in the lobby of the Charles Hotel. “I’m in the Charles,” she said, when he picked up. “I asked for you at the front desk but there is some kind of misunderstanding, because they haven’t got a bit of you here.”
“My sweetie,” he said. “Do you want a bit of me?”
“Yes,” she heard herself saying. She was thinking of something else. She was thinking of buying a box of éclairs, and wondering if Glee would eat one.
“How is Glee?”
“Very bad. I can’t come back yet.”
“How has it been to see her?”
“Do you know what? I’m in the only phone box. I’m going to write and tell you the whole story, but I can’t now. I’ll call again soon. I can’t call from there, there’s a housekeeper.”
“Your voice sounds lovely. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too,” she said automatically.
The first few days that she’d spent in New Orleans she was so sensitive to time she thought she’d gone mad. Every minute that passed taxed her awareness with its swarms of detail and its cadaverousness. Every minute lay there and wouldn’t yield to the next minute, and the hours went on for days. And then, without warning, the time began to sluice by in great featureless sheets. Her mind permanently curled into that warm New Orleans blankness. In the mornings she bought fresh brioches to bring back to the house, or sat alone in a café. She began to monitor the transformations going on in the garden. She helped Mary Frances stake the top-heavy peonies. “Before I worked for your mama I worked for this awful old woman,” Mary Frances would commence, and Katherine no longer was impatient to escape her. She listened to the chronicles of Mary Frances’s life in service, confirmed Mary Frances’s opinions of the relative refinement of one lady, or household, or city, as opposed to another. She encouraged Mary Frances to exercise her full powers as a chef, and then spent days grocery shopping in attempts to acquire the ingredients Mary Frances demanded. Now that time was an indistinct force she could barely perceive, Katherine sank into a black, sexless sleep every night and in the mornings she stepped into the changeless regime of the house. She stood in Glee’s room for hours with her, reading and interpreting the mail. Mrs. Joseph Monroe’s presence is desired. “Oh, we’ve never liked those people!” Glee would cry. Each time Katherine assented, and then reread the invitation, so that the venue of the upcoming event could be extensively disparaged. She found she drew as much pleasure from playing the role of the dutiful daughter as anyone who has ever discovered they are more free to behave like themselves when they wear a disguise.
When Katherine came to see her one morning, Glee was anxious and distracted. The delicate skin beneath her eyes had turned as violet as a bruise. “I’m so tired, baby,” she said. “I don’t sleep at all.”
“Yes, you do. You can’t lie there all night wide awake. I came in early this morning and you were dozing.”
“Was I? I don’t think so. I heard you open the door.”
“I must have wakened you then.”
“I don’t think so. You were wearing that strawberry-pattern wrap I gave you. You looked pretty in it.”
“Thank you.”
“There. That’s a nice answer.” From outside they heard Mary Frances calling out to the mailman. Glee sighed and looked at the ceiling. “I want to settle something with you.”
“Don’t you start talking that way,” Katherine said chidingly.
“No lightness.” Looking at her mother Katherine flushed suddenly and turned away. “You don’t have to look at me but you have to listen.”
“I am.”
“I want you to know that your father hated me for the way I was with you. He never understood it, and that’s what I wanted. He never knew about you. He thought I was vicious and he thought I was a terrible mother and I let him, because I never wanted him to know the fault was yours. If he had ever found out about it I planned to tell him Charles had raped you.”
Katherine stared at her. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“I certainly would. And I kept us away from Sewanee. I didn’t trust you to keep your own secret.”
“Stop it, Mommy.”
“You couldn’t keep a secret if someone lifted the lid of your brain and dropped it in there without your even knowing. You would open your mouth and blurt it out. Or you would show it in your behavior. Your behavior always damned you.”
She stood up, her face streaming. “Are you finished?”
“No, I’m not. If you’re going to marry Charles Addison I’d prefer you do it after I’m dead.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I said I’d prefer it. I’m well aware you’ll do what you please.”
She went down the stairs, over the fine carpet, out the back door and into the garden. The air seemed to vibrate with bees. The sun blazed distantly at the back of a perfectly clear, bleached noon sky. She didn’t know why she had thought, sliding into a new normalness, that a moment like this wouldn’t come. She walked up and down the narrowed pathways, bumping the overgrown plants, holding her ribs as she sobbed. The heat was so intense that the streets were deserted and the day almost silent, and she was determined to add no sound to it. Gradually the tranquil upper chamber of her mind began to notice how narrow the walk seemed, and how unmysterious its pattern was, compared to what she’d thought as a child. As a child she would sit here all day. She caught a glimpse of the way she’d seen then, a quick exposure like a camera’s shutter opening, her brown child’s legs against the rough red of the bricks. Then she heard footsteps behind her and Mary Frances saying, experimentally, “Miss Kitty?”
She turned around. “If you call me that again I’ll murder you,” she said, wiping her face.
“This ought to cheer you up. It’s a letter.”
The letter from Chang was nested inside the letter from Charles, unopened. “I’m sorry I didn’t send this on sooner,” Charles wrote, “but I kept thinking you would be back.” Chang’s letter was a month old, and postmarked Chicago. She tore it open and read four meticulous lines: “I am writing to you from Chicago, where I am enjoying myself very much. I will spend the summer here. I have the luck of an interesting job.” She recognized that tone. A whole letter had been composed, assembled, and mailed to transmit to her that arctic, careless tone. She sat down in the arbor and smiled. Well, she thought. Well.