The Reconciliation Hour took place in the kitchen over a bottle of rum. Aunt Harry drank it (straight!) without wincing, which led me to the inevitable conclusion that she had been drinking all along, drinking on the sly. They sat across from each other, befogged, hardly concerned at all that Della had run off and left a sink full of dishes. (“She would have to go and do a thing like this in our greatest hour,” Mrs. Klein said.) They refused to look at the ugly pile of dishes in the sink. (“I never did trust that girl,” Aunt Harry said. “Bred wrong.”)
Because they ignored me quite a bit, and because it was late, I left them sitting there at the kitchen table. I could have forgotten them right away had the tone of their bickering zigzagged along with its usual inflections and with its customary cadences. But something was wrong: they were having a hard time letting so much water go under the bridge. For one thing, Aunt Harry seemed to be on the defensive throughout their needlepoint combat; she seemed, in spite of her triumphant claim on Sargeant, to be the loser, for it was not the tragedy of Sargeant’s sordid life that preoccupied their thought, but rather Aunt Harry’s betrayal of Sargeant. No matter how many times Mrs. Klein reminded her that it was understandable, that it was necessary under the circumstances—spilling the beans as she did—there was an undisguised glee in Mrs. Klein’s voice, and Aunt Harry must have detected it and she must have known that she would never hear the end of it; she probably already heard the words Mrs. Klein would use (“treacherous,” “blabbermouth”) at some future date, some future time. However, their new crisis seemed incredibly self-centered. Here was their Loved One in his grave because he’d led such a downward life, but those two cared only about their game of squelches—a game neither would win, and a game that would last for eternity. Their indifference was villainous; it was as though they sat over Sargeant’s remains picking at each other.
Aunt Harry was as busy as Faust in her attempt to regain her position. She could not stand for her opponent to have one up on her—more than one up on her by the way she was carrying on (influence of rum aside), talking quicker than crickets chatter. Her tactic, it seemed—and I cannot be at all sure, for I was cold-shouldered and hinted to darkly that it was past my bedtime (theirs too, for that matter!), so I left the kitchen, not too graciously, to scout around for a bedtime cigarette—but her tactic, it seemed, was to gain ascendency by assuring Mrs. Klein that Maurice LeFleur was a fake all the time, that she knew that Maurice LeFleur was a quack, a low sort of person out to get anything he could get, and that she just went along with the gag to pacify a doting old matriarch. Well, I wondered how far even Aunt Harry could stretch that one, but I wasn’t around to find out. I did hear occasionally, floating upstairs through the open window in the summer night (morning—it was going on four o’clock)—I did hear things like Harriet Gibbs!
And twenty minutes later I heard: low-down, just plain low-down.
Then dozing. Later. Ten minutes later? Seconds? Later on I heard: How a grown woman, lo, these—a woman in her seventies—
Late sixties.
—in her seventies could be so gullible…
Between these exuberant flayings I dozed and sometimes heard the footsteps of Maurice LeFleur, who probably was getting himself ready to go, or he was pacing the floor as he made up his mind whether or not he was going off to teach Della how to be a whore.
Time edged along towards dawn as I dozed and woke, heard footsteps, heard rum-thick voices, and dozed again. At one point, when the outside looked metallic and cold, as though lit by a gray neon light, I got up. I felt affirmative. Authoritative. I thought I would try to make Aunt Harry and Mrs. Klein go to bed. It was insane to drink right through to early morning. But as I was opening my door I heard someone on the stairs—probably they’d decided at last to come to bed. Yet as soon as I prepared to settle down again for serious sleep, I heard the footsteps descend. They were the brittle, impatient steps of Aunt Harry, but I couldn’t be sure; the humidity and quiet of coming dawn fogged the senses and clogged the mind.
Doors opened. Doors shut. Upstairs, down. Drawers opened. Shut. Only deaf Bertram had peace. He always slept.
I did, finally—how long? two minutes later? ten?—get up to double check the “Moose at Bay” in the hallway, and I lifted it out enough to see that Mrs. Klein’s jewel case was not sitting on the tiny nook in the wall behind the ugly picture. LeFleur could not have known about it. No one knew, not even Della, except me, except Aunt Harry and Mrs. Klein.
When I heard the racket down below, in the back of the kitchen, in the yard, my drowsiness cleared and I ran to my window to see. Outside, where the dawn was turning into oyster colors, there were harsh shouts and I saw below Maurice LeFleur in flight with his black leather bag. Aunt Harry and Mrs. Klein were behind him with sticks, toddling in housecoats—it looked like a speeded-up minuet, that pathetic little chase in the yard, in the dawn. Maurice LeFleur, a butterfly in a suit and vest of midnight blue, made an easy escape, a grin on his face as he turned to raise his free arm in courtly farewell, but—in absurd swiftness—as though the gods resented the Picasso loops of his lips, he stumbled on the salt lick, fell on his face in the joe-pye weeds. Aunt Harry was first on him with a knotty stick, then Mrs. Klein. He hunched up his shoulders, writhed, got on his hands and knees, but fell again under the blows of the heavy sticks over his head, blow after blow, from the ladies above him. It was good to see—at first; he deserved the disgrace. But when he was no longer struggling and lay there, his canopy head in the joe-pye weeds, wet with dew, I began to feel sick in the stomach: the ladies beat on, one after another, like railroad workers pounding spikes. And they continued, as though he were a snake that might spring upon them, as though they were beating something else—not a man, not a snake—as though it were a beating spot. It was inhuman, nonhuman, that beating. They were not beating a man. They must stop. Please stop. They must stop.
One of the sticks was tinted red.
“Stop it!” I shouted, but they would not hear me. I ran downstairs to the yard, but he had struggled free, and he was running, leaving behind his black leather bag, towards the grove of trees. They followed, as best the rum allowed them, and with sticks raised high they entered the black grove slashing pell-mell the innocent trees. I could not see into the grove but I heard the crunches beneath their feet, and faintly, in the distance, between the noise of a heavy caravan on the highway, I heard a crackle, almost tender—Maurice LeFleur had made his escape. Yet they stayed on in the grove a bit, hitting tree trunks with their sticks, and then, abruptly, the curve of the sun pushed up into the gray air, at the far end of the earth.
Mrs. Klein’s face was blue when she came out of the grove. Aunt Harry’s looked ashen, and it seemed to be swelling, and she pushed a hand in tight towards her withered breast. She got ahead of Mrs. Klein and dipped into Maurice LeFleur’s bag, which was wet with dew and glistened with the first rays from the sun. “See,” she said, holding up the jewel box that encased the Teardrop. “Didn’t I tell you he was a robber, too? Didn’t I tell you? Lookit,” she said, taking out the gaudy necklace, “see what that robber was robbing!”
It was so stilted, her voice. So frightened. It was not a voice I’d heard from her any of my days, and I had not the heart to ask her how did the necklace get there, who took it from behind the picture. I could not prove anything, I could not say anything, I could not indicate my burning suspicion—because—because her hands shook so. Aunt Harry’s hands shook so, holding that necklace up in the morning sun to our faces. Her poor hands shook so. Her hands were so eager to demonstrate. So eager. Her hands shook so that I did not see her face. I did not see that she was dying.
“Run, Oliver, her medicine! Run!”
When I returned, I found Mrs. Klein crying, and she said, her pink fists tight, “Oh, Oliver, look what Harriet’s done. Look what she’s done.”
She lay still on the ground, near the salt lick.
“Harriet? Harriet? Oh, Oliver, is she dead? Is she dead?”
Sun pushed up and filled my eyes and cocks were crowing and Mrs. Klein pressed her face into my neck and we clung to each other for a long time.