with me from now on, Kathy?”
“Oh, yes.”
Now there was a rueful quality in Stella’s voice. She lifted her shoulders and let them drop with a sigh. “That’s good, because there doesn’t seem to be any way out of it. Oh, well, what the hell! Maybe a little responsibility will be good for me. But I shouldn’t swear in front of you, should I? Did your mother ever swear?”
“Once in a while. When she got very angry about something.”
“Oh, sure. Only under sufficient provocation, I’ll bet. Your mother didn’t like me, Kathy. She didn’t approve of me. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Well, she didn’t. If she had, she could’ve made an easier time of it for herself and for you, too. Then you and I could have been friends long ago. But no matter now. Did you know I was married once?”
“No.”
“I was. The man’s name was Lonnie, and he was very handsome and exciting, but he didn’t do the kind of things people approve of. With their help, he died young, so you see it’s not only the good it happens to. But, anyhow, he left me lots of money, and it will be fun to have you help me spend some of it. Would you like lots of money to spend?”
“I think so.”
“Good.” The light, electric hand moved again, hair and temple and cheek. “You’re really quite pretty, you know. Something done with your hair and a few attractive frocks, will make a big difference. How old are you, Kathy?”
“Ten.”
“So old? Then it’s high time something was done.” She leaned back in her chair and laughed again, and at last the sound was full-bodied, though still light—an airy, antic sound tumbling over itself to get past her lips. “Now suppose you run out into the yard and let me start finding out what’s left to be done here.”
Obediently, Kathy went out into the yard and sat under a tree and watched the slowly shifting pattern of the leaves on the grass, and the next day they buried her mother in the cemetery at the edge of town. She sat on a hard, folding chair as the casket descended into the earth, and for a moment she felt again the intense grief and at the same time the guilt that came because the grief was not enough. Then she was aware of Stella’s hand on her own, and she looked up at the silver hair shining in the sun, and grief and guilt were emotions that had no place in the new world.
Then, after a few days of final preparation, she went with Stella to the new town where Stella lived. It was not a larger town than the old one, but it seemed larger because Stella lived there. Neither was it a more beautiful or a more exciting or a more anything town, but it seemed more of everything for the same reason. What Stella touched or influenced in any way always took to itself something of the essence of Stella.
Stella’s house, however, was really larger than the old one. It was built of brick behind a wide lawn with a box hedge around it and elm and maple trees growing between the hedge and the house. There were eight rooms in the house, four upstairs and four down, and there was a colored woman who came in every day to keep the rooms clean. She also cooked and laundered and told Kathy stories about Stella, how wonderful Stella was and how all men, or at least a lot of men, were crazy about her.
This was true. There were a lot of men. Almost every night, after Kathy was upstairs in bed, one of them called for Stella. It became the colored woman’s duty, after Kathy came to stay, to remain in the house until Stella’s return at whatever hour. Kathy didn’t like the men. She regarded them as trespassers, thieves of the time she might have had with Stella herself, and her attitude toward them went through a slow metamorphosis from a general resentment to a childish, particularized hatred as she learned to identify them as individuals.
With the door of her room open so she could hear, she would lie in bed and follow in detail the audible stages of each arrival and departure. Allowing for a little variation in the time element, they all followed a routine that acquired for Kathy in its constant repetition the quality of torture, like the ancient practice of letting water drip on someone’s forehead—the car stopping at the curb in front of the house, footsteps on the approach from the street, the doorbell, Stella’s voice in greeting and the masculine response. Sometimes, if Stella wasn’t taken away at once, there would be other sounds—of ice and glass, of music, of the many small supports with which a man and a woman may shore a frail relationship.
She fought sleep. She fought it with all her strength in the hope that she could be awake when Stella returned, and sometimes she was successful. There was a reason for this. She and Stella shared the same room, and this was because Kathy, in the time following the death of her mother, was subject to nightmares. She awoke screaming in the night, terrified by the pressing darkness. So Stella, a warm and responsive person with a genuine and growing love for her niece, had taken Kathy into her room. They had twin beds, and it was a wonderful arrangement, because Kathy, if she could only stay awake, could have with Stella the last delicious intimacy of the day.
Lying very still, looking through the narrowest of slits that left vision a little blurred by her lashes, she watched Stella come into the room and turn on the soft light through which she moved while getting ready for bed.
Stella’s hair was usually a little disheveled and her lips sometimes a little smudged, and she moved about her business with a kind of floating dreaminess to the accompaniment of a trivial tune which she hummed to herself. As in everything she did, there was a charming disorder in Stella’s undressing. Moving to the tune, in and out of the adjoining bathroom, she left her dress here and her slip there, one stocking one place and the other another, and so through a litter of shimmer and froth until she stood at last by the bed in a transparent cloud of nightgown.
She learned soon enough that Kathy watched her. The knowledge gave her a sincere, unanalyzed pleasure, and she fell into the habit of stopping beside Kathy’s bed when she returned in darkness from turning off the light. “Kathy?”
“Yes, Stella?”
“You’re awake again, you little devil. Do you know what time it is? You’ll grow up with bags under your eyes.”
“You stay awake late. You don’t have bags.”
“That’s entirely different. I’m older and don’t need so much sleep. Besides, I can sleep in the morning. I don’t have to get up and go to school.”
“I’m sorry, Stella. I just couldn’t sleep.”
“Would you like me to tell you where I went and what I did tonight?”
“Oh, yes.”
This was a lie. Or, rather, it was partly a lie. She didn’t really want to hear about Stella’s activity, because that involved one of the many men as a participant, and the men were already, so soon, the dark violators of the shining center of her life which was Stella. Hearing Stella’s dreamy, unconsciously cruel accounts of them was an experience that filled her with a sickening resentment that frightened her because it was, though she didn’t yet recognize it, evidence of her own violent potential. Still, on the other hand, she would rather suffer the anguish of Stella’s accounts than to have her go on to her own bed and lie down in silence, so it was also partly true that she wanted to listen.
“Very well, then,” Stella would say. “For just a few minutes. Move over, please.”
And this was the climax that Kathy waited for. To move
