The Little Friend

“I like the things you make, Adelaide,” Harriet would always say. She did, too. Though she had no use for aprons, pillowcases, tea towels, she hoarded Adelaide’s garish linens and had drawers full of them in her room. It was not the linens but the designs she liked: Dutch girls, dancing coffee pots, snoozing Mexicans in sombrero hats. She coveted them to the point of stealing them out of other people’s cupboards, and she had been extremely irritated that Edie was sending the pillowcases off to charity (“Don’t be ridiculous, Harriet. What on earth can you want with that?”) when she wanted them herself.

“I know you like them, darling,” murmured Adelaide, her voice tremulous with self-pity, drooping to give Harriet a theatrical kiss as Tat and Edie exchanged looks behind her back. “Someday, when I’m gone, you may be glad you have those things.”

“That baby,” said Chester to Ida, “love to start a scrap.”

Edie, who did not much mind a scrap herself, found in her youngest granddaughter a solid competitor. Despite, or perhaps because of this, they enjoyed each other’s company and Harriet spent a good bit of time over at her grandmother’s house. Edie often complained of Harriet’s stubbornness and lack of manners, and grumbled about how she was always under foot, but though Harriet was exasperating Edie found her a more satisfying companion than Allison, who had very little to say. She liked having Harriet around, though she wouldn’t have admitted it, and missed her on the afternoons when she didn’t come.

Though the aunts loved Harriet, she was not as affectionate a child as her sister, and her pridefulness troubled them. She was too forthright. She did not at all understand reticence or diplomacy, and in this she resembled Edie more than Edie realized.

In vain, the aunts tried to teach her to be polite. “But don’t you understand, darling,” said Tat, “that if you don’t like fruitcake, it’s better to eat it anyway instead of hurting your hostess’s feelings?”

“But I don’t like fruitcake.”

“I know you don’t, Harriet. That’s why I used that example.”

“But fruitcake is horrible. I don’t know anybody that likes it. And if I tell her I like it she’s just going to keep on giving it to me.”

“Yes, dear, but that’s not the point. The point is, if somebody has gone to the trouble to cook you something, it’s good manners to eat it even if you don’t want it.”

“The Bible says not to lie.”

“That’s different. This is a white lie. The Bible’s talking about another kind of lie.”

“The Bible doesn’t say black or white lies. It just says lies.”

“Believe me, Harriet. It’s true, Jesus tells us not to lie, but that doesn’t mean we have to be rude to our hostess.”

“Jesus doesn’t say anything about our hostess. He says that lying is a sin. He says that the Devil is a liar and the prince of lies.”

“But Jesus says Love Thy Neighbor, doesn’t He?” said Libby, inspired, taking over for the now speechless Tat. “Doesn’t that mean your hostess? Your hostess is your neighbor, too.”

“That’s right,” said Tat gladly. “Not,” she hastened, “that anybody is trying to say your hostess necessarily lives next door to you. All Love Thy Neighbor means is that you should eat what you’re offered and be gracious about it.”

“I don’t see why loving my neighbor means telling him I love fruitcake. When I don’t.”

No one, not even Edie, had any idea how to respond to this grim pedantry. It could go on for hours. It didn’t matter if you talked until you were blue in the face. Even more infuriating was that Harriet’s arguments, preposterous as they were, usually had at bottom some more or less sound scriptural basis. Edie was unimpressed by this. Though she did charity and missionary work, and sang in the church choir, she did not actually believe that every word of the Bible was true any more than, in her heart, she actually believed some of her own favorite sayings: that, for example, everything that happened was always for the best or that, deep down, Negroes were exactly the same as white people. But the aunts—Libby, in particular—were troubled if they thought too much about some of the things Harriet said. Her sophisms were grounded undeniably in the Bible, yet flew in the face of common sense and everything that was right. “Maybe,” Libby said uneasily after Harriet had stumped off home to supper, “maybe the Lord doesn’t see a difference between a white lie and a wicked lie. Maybe they’re all wicked in His eyes.”

“Now, Libby.”

“Maybe it takes a little child to remind us of that.”

“I’d just as soon go to Hell,” snapped Edie—who had been absent during the earlier exchange—“as have to go around all the time letting everybody in town know exactly what I thought of them.”

“Edith!” cried all her sisters at once.

“Edith, you don’t mean that!”

“I do. And I don’t care to know what everybody in town thinks of me, either.”

“I can’t imagine what it is you’ve done, Edith,” said self-righteous Adelaide, “that makes you believe everyone thinks so badly of you.”