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By Root 5991 0

My aunt offered to provide my education. As a consequence much of the past fifteen years has been spent in her house. She is really my great aunt. Yet she is younger by so many years than her brothers that she might easily be my father’s sister—or rather the daughter of all three brothers, since it is as their favorite and fondest darling that she still appears in her own recollection, the female sport of a fierce old warrior gens and no doubt for this reason never taken quite seriously, even in her rebellion—as when she left the South, worked In a settlement house in Chicago and, like many well-born Southern ladies, embraced advanced political ideas. After years of being the sort of “bird” her brothers indulged her in being and even expected her to be—her career reached its climax when she served as a Red Cross volunteer in the Spanish civil war, where I cannot picture her otherwise than as that sort of fiercely benevolent demoniac Yankee lady most incomprehensible to Spaniards—within the space of six months she met and married Jules Cutrer, widower with child, settled down in the Garden District and became as handsome and formidable as her brothers. She is no longer a “bird.” It is as if, with her illustrious brothers dead and gone, she might now at last become what they had been and what as a woman had been denied her; soldierly both in look and outlook. With her blue-white hair and keen face and terrible gray eyes, she is somehow at sixty-five still the young prince.

It is just as I thought. In an instant we are off and away down the hall and into her office, where she summons me for her “talks.” This much is certain: it is bad news about Kate. If it were a talk about me, my aunt would not be looking at me. She would be gazing into the hive-like recesses of her old desk, finger pressed against her lip. But instead she shows me something and searches my face for what I see. With her watching me, it is difficult to see anything. There is a haze. Between us there is surely a carton of dusty bottles—bottles?—yes, surely bottles, yet blink as I will I can’t be sure.

“Do you see these whisky bottles?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“And this kind?” She gives me an oblong brown bottle.

“Yes.”

“Do you know where they came from?”

“No’m.”

“Mercer found them on top of an armoire. That armoire.” She points mysteriously to the very ceiling above us. “He was setting out rat poision.”

“In Kate’s room?”

“Yes. What do you think?”

“Those are not whisky bottles.”

“What are they?”

“Wine. Gipsy Rose. They make wine bottles flat like that.”

“Read that.” She nods at the bottle in my hand.

“Sodium pentobarbital. One and one half grains. This is a wholesaler’s bottle.”

“Do you know where we found that?”

“In the box?”

“In the incinerator. The second in a week.”

I am silent. Now my aunt does take her seat at the desk.

“I haven’t told Walter. Or Jules. Because I’m not really worried. Kate is just fine. She is going to come through with flying colors. And she and Walter are going to be happy. But as time grows short, she is getting a little nervous.”

“You mean you think she is afraid of another accident?”

“She is afraid of a general catastrophe. But that is not what worries me.”

“What worries you?”

“I don’t want her moping around the house again.”

“She’s not working downtown with you?”

“Not for two weeks.”

“Does she feel bad?”

“Oh no. Nothing like that. But she’s a little scared.”

“Is she seeing Dr. Mink?”

“She refuses. She thinks that if she goes to see a doctor she’ll get sick.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“She will not go to the ball. Now that’s all right. But it is very important that she not come to the point where it becomes more and more difficult to meet people.”

“She’s seen no one?”

“No one but Walter. Now all in the world I want you to do is take her to the Lejiers and watch the parade from the front porch. It is not a party. There will be no question of making an entrance or an exit. There is nothing to brace for. You will drop in, speak or not speak, and leave.”

“She is that bad?”

“She is not bad at all. I mean to