The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [322]
"Monkeys!" she said, leading us up, looking back and forth between Kate and me, as if she had to decide which one she liked best, before anything else in the world could be attended to. She had a long neck and that short face, and round, brown, jumpy eyes with little circles of wrinkles at each blink, like water wrinkles after something's popped in; that looked somehow like a twinkle, at her age. "Step aside for the family, please?" she said next, in tones I thought rather melting.
Kate and I did not dare look at each other. We did not dare look anywhere. As soon as we had moved through the porch crowd and were arrived inside the breezeway—where, however, there were a few people too, standing around—I looked and saw the corner clock was wrong. I was deeply aware that all clocks worked in this house, as if they had been keeping time just for me all this while, and I remembered that the bell in the yard was rung every day at straight-up noon, to bring them in out of the fields at picking time. And I had once supposed they rang it at midnight too.
Around us, voices sounded as they always did everywhere, in a house of death, soft and inconsequential, and tidily assertive.
"I believe Old Hodge's mules done had an attack of the wanderlust. Passed through my place Tuesday headed East, and now you seen 'em in Goshen."
Sister Anne was saying bodingly to us, "You just come right on through,"
This was where Kate burst into tears. I held her to me, to protect her from more kisses. "When, when?" she gasped. "When did it happen, Sister Anne?"
"Now when did what happen?"
That was the kind of answer one kind of old maid loves to give. It goes with "Ask me sometime, and I'll tell you." Sister Anne lifted her brow and fixed her eye on the parlor doorway. The door was opened into that room, but the old red curtain was drawn across it, with bright light, looking red too, streaming out around it.
Just then there was a creaking sound inside there, like an old winter suit bending at the waist, and a young throat was cleared.
"Little bit of commotion here today, but I would rather you didn't tell Uncle Felix anything about it," said Sister Anne.
"Tell him! Is he alive?" Kate cried wildly, breaking away from me, and then even more wildly, "I might have known it! What sort of frolic are you up to out here, Sister Anne?"
Sister Anne suddenly marched to the other side of us and brought the front bedroom door to with a good country slam. That room—Uncle Felix's—had been full of people too.
"I beg your pardon," said Kate in a low voice in the next moment. We were still just inside the house—in the breezeway that was almost as wide as the rooms it ran between from front porch to back. It was a hall, really, but still when I was a child called the breezeway. Open at the beginning, it had long been enclosed, and papered like the parlor, in red.
"Why, Kate. You all would be the first to know. Do you think I'd have let everybody come, regardless of promises, if Uncle Felix had chosen not to be with us still, on the day?"
While we winced, a sudden flash filled the hall with light, changing white to black, black to white—I saw the roses shudder and charge in my hands, Kate with white eyes rolled, and Sister Anne with the livid brow of a hostess and a pencil behind one ear.
"That's what you mean," said Sister Anne. "That's a photographer. He's here in our house today, taking pictures. He's itinerant," she said, underlining in her talk. "And he asked to use our parlor—we didn't ask him. Well—it is complete."
"What is?"
"Our parlor. And all in shape—curtains washed—you know."
Out around the curtain came the very young man, dressed in part in a soldier's uniform not his, looking slightly dazed. He tiptoed out onto the porch. The bedroom door opened on a soft murmuring again.
"Listen," said Sister Anne, leaning toward it. "Hear them in yonder?"
A voice was saying, "My little girl says she'd rather have come on this trip than gone to the zoo."
There was a look