The Little Friend

“Maybe not, but Moses and all them at least followed the Ten Commandments. They weren’t out there worshiping cats and dogs.”

“Atlanteans,” Tat said haughtily, over the laughter of her sisters, “Atlanteans knew many things that modern scientists would be glad to get their hands on today. Daddy knew about Atlantis and he was a good Christian man and had more education than all of us here in this room put together.”

“Daddy,” Edie muttered, “Daddy used to get me out of bed in the night saying Kaiser Wilhelm was coming and to hide the silver down the well.”

“Edith!”

“Edith, that’s not right. He was sick then. After how good he was to all of us!”

“I’m not saying Daddy wasn’t a good man, Tatty. I’m just saying I was the one who had to take care of him.”

“Daddy always knew me,” said Adelaide eagerly—who, being the youngest, and, she believed, her father’s favorite, never missed an opportunity to remind her sisters of this. “He remembered me right up until the end. The day he died, he took my hand and he said, ‘Addie, honey, what have they done to me?’ I don’t know why in the world I was the only one he recognized. It was the funniest thing.”

Harriet enjoyed very much looking at Tat’s books, which included not only the Atlantis volumes but more established works such as Gibbon and Ridpath’s History as well as a number of paperbacked romances set in ancient times with colored pictures of gladiators on the covers.

“Of course, these are not historical works,” explained Tat. “They are just little light novels with historical backdrops. But they are very entertaining books, and educational, too. I used to give them to the children down at the high school to try to get them interested in Roman times. You probably couldn’t do that any more with the kind of books they all write nowadays but these are clean little novels, not the kind of trash they have now.” She ran a bony forefinger—big-knuckled with arthritis—down the row of identical spines. “H. Montgomery Storm. I think he used to write novels about the Regency period as well, under a woman’s name, but I can’t remember what it was.”

Harriet was not at all interested in the gladiator novels. They were only love stories in Roman dress, and she disliked anything which had to do with love or romance. Her favorite of Tat’s books was a large volume called Pompeii and Herculaneum: The Forgotten Cities, illustrated with color plates.

Tat was happy enough to look at this with Harriet, too. They sat on Tat’s velveteen sofa and turned the pages together, past delicate murals from ruined villas, past baker’s stalls preserved perfectly, bread and all, beneath fifteen feet of ash, past the faceless gray plaster casts of dead Romans still twisted in the same eloquent postures of anguish in which they had fallen, two thousand years ago, beneath the rain of cinders on the cobblestones.

“I don’t see why those poor people didn’t have the sense to leave earlier,” said Tat. “I guess they didn’t know what a volcano was in those days. Also, I suppose it was a little like when Hurricane Camille blew in on the Gulf Coast. There were a lot of foolish people who wouldn’t leave when the city was evacuated and sat around drinking at the Buena Vista Hotel like it was some kind of a big party. Well, let me tell you, Harriet, they were three weeks picking those bodies out of the treetops after the water went down. And not one brick from the Buena Vista left on top of another brick. You wouldn’t remember the Buena Vista, darling. They had angelfish painted on the water glasses.” She turned the page. “Look. You see this cast of the little dog that died? He’s still got a biscuit in his mouth. Somewhere I read a lovely story that somebody wrote about this very dog. In the story, the dog belonged to a little Pompeiian beggar boy that it loved, and it died trying to fetch food for him so he would have something to eat on the journey out of Pompeii. Isn’t that sad? Of course, nobody knows that for sure, but it’s probably pretty close to the truth, don’t you think?”

“Maybe the dog wanted the biscuit for itself.”

“I doubt it. You know that food was probably the last thing on the poor thing’s mind with all those people running around screaming and ashes falling everywhere.”

Though Tat shared Harriet’s interest in the buried city, from a human-interest perspective, she did not understand why Harriet’s fascination extended to even the lowliest and least dramatic aspects of ruin: broken utensils, drab pot shards, corroded hunks of undistinguished metal. Certainly she did not realize that Harriet’s obsession with fragments had to do with her family’s history.