The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [319]
"If you talk like that," said Kate, "we're going to go right this minute, right out into the heat. I thought this was going to be a good day."
"Oh, it is! Grand—Run upstairs both, and get your baths, you hot little children. You're supposed to go to Suzanne's, I know it." Kate, slow-motion, leaned over and kissed her mother, and took the glass. "Kate!—If only I could see him one more time. As he was. And Mingo. Old Uncle Theodore. The peace. Listen: you give him my love. He's my Uncle Felix. Don't tell him why I didn't come. That might distress him more than not seeing me there."
"What's Uncle Felix's trouble?" I asked, shyly at last: but things, even fatal things, did have names. I wanted to know.
Aunt Ethel smiled, looked for a minute as if she would not be allowed to tell me, and then said, "Old age.—I think Sister Anne's lazy, idle!" she cried. "You're drawing it out of me. She never cooked nor sewed nor even cultivated her mind! She was a lily of the field." Aunt Ethel suddenly showed us both highly polished little palms, with the brave gesture a girl uses toward a fortune teller—then looked into them a moment absently and hid them at her sides. "She just hasn't got anybody of her own, that's her trouble. And she needs somebody."
"Hush! She will be coming here next!" Kate cried, and our smiles began to brim once more.
"She has no inner resources," confided my aunt, and watched to see if I were too young to guess what that meant. "How you girls do set each other off! Not that you're bothering me, I love you in here, and wouldn't deprive myself of it. Yes, you all just better wait and go Sunday. Make things as usual." She shut her eyes.
"Look—look!" chanted Kate.
Rachel, who believed in cutting roses in the heat of the day—and nobody could prevent her now, since we forgot to cut them ourselves or slept through the mornings—came in Aunt Ethel's room bearing a vaseful. Aunt Ethel's roses were at their height. A look of satisfaction on Rachel's face was like something nobody could interrupt. To our sighs, for our swooning attitudes, she paraded the vase through the room and around the bed, where she set it on the little table there and marched back to her kitchen.
"Rachel wants you to go. All right, you tell Uncle Felix," said Aunt Ethel, turning toward the roses, spreading her little hand out chordlike over them, "—of course he must have these—that that's Souvenir de Claudius Pernet—and that's Mermaid—Mary Wallace—Silver Moon—those three of course Etoiles—and oh, Duquesa de Penaranda—Gruss an Aachen's of course his cutting he grew for me a thousand years ago— but there's my Climbing Thor! Gracious!" she sighed, looking at it. Still looking at the roses she waited a moment. Pressing out of the vase, those roses of hers looked heavy, drunken with their own light and scent, their stems, just two minutes ago severed with Rachel's knife, vivid with pale thorns through cut-glass. "You know, Sundays always are hotter than any other days, and I tell you what: I do think you'd better go on to Mingo today, regardless of what you find."
Circling around in her mind like old people—which Aunt Ethel never used to do, she never used to get back!—she got back to where she started.
"Yes'm," said Kate.
"Aunt Ethel, wouldn't it be better for everybody if he'd come in town to the hospital?" I asked, with all my city seriousness.
"He wouldn't consider it. So give Sister Anne my love, and give Uncle Felix my dear love. Will you remember? Go on, naked," said my aunt to her daughter. "Take your cousin upstairs in her city bonnet. You both look right feverish to me. Start in a little while, so you can get your visit over and come back in the cool of the evening."
"These nights now are so bright," said my cousin Kate, with a strange stillness in her small