Chapter 8 #3
“Well, I volunteer at the orphanage three, sometimes four, days a week. Right now I’m on the junior committee, but Garnett Pittman—she’s the chairlady—said I might get on the senior committee if I play my cards right.
Not a lot of people know this, but Garnett had a baby that died before it was born and she never could have another one after that.
” Frances sighed. “It’s so noble how she’s dedicated her life to those poor little orphan girls. ”
“She sounds like a very good person,” I said. My fingers were starting to prune and I grabbed the towel in her lap. “By the way, I’m not wearing that dress.”
Before she’d sat on the stool, she’d brought in a white dress and hung it on the back of the door. It had black trim and a shiny black belt.
“Just try it on, Birdie, it might fit.”
When I got it on, we stood side by side in the mirror.
It was short, like I knew it would be. Frances was three inches shorter than me, and though neither one of us had much chest, Frances looked curvier because of that tiny little waist she had.
I pulled a second blue gingham dress out of my suitcase, and she started brushing out the wrinkles with her hand. “Stop,” I said.
“But it’s wrinkled and it looks so homemade.”
“It’s better, it’s Meemaw made,” I said, pulling it out of her judgy fingers and putting it on over my petticoat. “Help me.”
When I’d buttoned myself, she pinned up one side of my damp hair back with one of her silver clips.
My sister, who did beautiful embroidery work, was very good at taking something plain and making it beautiful, or in my case, slightly less plain.
She looked me over, frowning down at my old saddle oxfords, but let them go.
“Your eyebrows are so thick, I should pluck them.”
“That sounds fun, let’s save it till tomorrow.” As we walked out, I said, “By the way, your tub’s not draining, it must be clogged.”
“I know, I’ve asked Rory a hundred times to get it fixed.”
“I can probably fix it if you got a—”
“No,” she said, steering me by my shoulders.
“I know you like fixing things, but that’s all I need, Rory’s mother thinking my sister’s a plumber.
Now look, when you meet Mrs. Tartt, don’t talk too much and be polite and—” She stopped, her eyes begging something, but I knew she was trying to be sweet.
In the end it won, though: “Please, don’t embarrass me, Birdie.”
I didn’t have much to go on regarding Mrs. Tartt.
From Frances’s letters, I assumed she was much older than our own mother of forty-seven.
I pictured a graying grande dame, maybe teetering on senile, and if she was worried about anything, it probably wasn’t money.
According to Frances, she was also “awful and rude,” which was fairly frightening considering how high Frances’s tolerance was for the awful, rich, and rude.
Upstairs, Frances led me past more bedrooms to the opposite end of the hall, where we descended a much grander staircase that flourished at the bottom.
It deposited us into a long, wide hall. The “grand hall,” she said, her voice echoing.
The hall ran down the center of the house with the back door on one end and the front door at the other.
I noticed a lovely blue grandfather clock, curvy like a woman, up by the front door.
It ticked softly, merely a suggestion of time here at Idlewilde.
“That’s Swedish,” Frances said. “Mrs. Tartt’s grandmother brought it over.
” As Frances gave me the rest of the tour, which she now pronounced tu-uh, she recited her tellings like she was reading something out of The World Almanac: “Idlewilde was built in 1847. Big Henry Tartt, Rory’s daddy, bought it from a poor Tartt cousin using money he’d made in the stock market. He was only twenty-five at the time.”
On the left side of the grand hall was the “formal” sitting room, with a thick wine-colored carpet and heavy, dark furniture, brocade settees. Practically every inch of the room had been swagged in green, mauve, and blue satin, framing the windows and even some of the walls.
“It’s a miracle Idlewilde managed to survive the Civil War,” Frances went on.
“The Yankee soldiers declared it too pretty to burn.” Right, I thought, must’ve been those Yankees who served on the decorations committee.
“And this is the dining room.” From the sitting room, Frances parted a set of enormous pocket doors as if she were parting seas.
Silver service glinted in glass cabinets along the walls.
A long, dark table down the center had sixteen straight-backed chairs around it, though tonight it was set for only three.
“Those chairs there are authentic Chippendolls—I mean dales. Chippendales,” she scolded herself.
“It’s very nice,” I said. “Very … angular.” I had no idea what the appropriate thing was to say. Standing beside the long, unpronounceable table, beneath the twelve-foot ceilings, I thought my sister looked small, unusually insignificant.
After that, she showed me rooms with names that didn’t have anything to do with what she did in them.
Such as, “This is the library, where we sit and read.” My sister didn’t read books.
She read picture show magazines, Good Housekeeping, and nickel romances.
“That’s Rory’s study in there, and this is the smoking room,” pointing to another pair of rooms off the right-hand side of the hall.
Frances didn’t smoke either—Mama’d said it was bad manners for a lady (so Meemaw’d promptly taught me how to roll my own when I was fifteen).
The only rooms true to their task were the bedrooms and dressing rooms upstairs.
I’d put money that was where Frances spent most of her time.
You’d never seen somebody get so dressed up to go to sleep as Frances.
The most amazing thing about the house to me, though, was it felt fairly cool, even with all the velvet swag and mahogany, even on a hot July afternoon.
“How big a farm is this?” I asked, gazing out a back window.
On past the overgrown grass, beyond a privacy border of crape myrtles, stretched empty fields that, like the Delta, looked like they were cropping weeds this year instead of cotton or corn.
If Rory was a “gentleman farmer,” in it for a little extra, not to get by on, I wondered if he was the kind of man who’d kick his sharecroppers off the land like the sad folks I’d seen from the train.
“Rory’s not a farmer, he’s a banker. He sold all those fields off years ago.”
“I take it he’s not a yardman either.” Not only did the backyard grass need cutting, a vegetable garden alongside a black barn sure looked like it could use a weeding.
“Whatever you do, do not bring up the state of the yard,” Frances said.
“It’s a sensitive subject. The Tartts are town folks.
All our food is store-bought except for the chickens because Rory likes a fresh egg in the morning.
And that old milk cow I wish we could get rid of. She’s been mooing all the time.”
“You milking her enough?” I asked. “Cows don’t just moo for their own entertainment.”
“Hush, I don’t know a thing about milking cows,” she said and walked on. Frances had milked a cow every dang day for eighteen years.
As we went back into the wide center hall, I said, “Oh look. There’s the telephone you didn’t call us back on.” Tucked under the big staircase was a black telephone on a table with a little wooden chair built into it.
“It’s a private line, they’re real expensive. Most everybody in town is on a party.”
I reached for the talker to see if it was as heavy as the one at the Foote, and her hand shot out.
“No. Rory’s fussy about people using it, it’ll run up the bill.”
At the far end of the hall, near the back door, Frances set her hand on my arm. “Alright. It’s time to meet her. Now listen, I want you to Be. Have,” she said in two words like that.
“What do you think I’m gonna do, Frances?” She didn’t answer that. I followed her into the last room on the left.
“And in here is the parlor, where we like to relax,” Frances said as if I were a fancy guest now.
It was a modest-sized room that ran along the back left of the house with a wall of windows that faced the back porch.
It had a lovely worn green carpet, overstuffed blue chairs.
I saw no unpronounceable furniture in here.
And on a salmon-pink sofa, a not-quite-plump little blond-haired lady sat listening to Bing Crosby do “At Your Command” on a radio set sitting in the windowsill.
“Mrs. Tartt,” Frances said. She nearly bowed to her. “We’ve had an unexpected visitor. I’d like you to meet my sister, Birdie.”
The little lady’s wide blue eyes widened even more.
“Well I declare. It’s so nice to meet you, Birdie.
Picador mentioned you had a visitor, Frances.
” She had a round friendly face, deep dimples set in both sides.
Wearing a pale blue suit, she had gobs of jewelry on: a gargantuan pearl necklace, a gold pin inscribed with Flower Club, Sustainer, and dangling sapphires that pulled down on her lobes.
When I bent to shake her white hand, it was weighty with rings on four fingers.
“Sit, sit please,” she said. Frances made a motion so I sat in the far fat blue chair on Mrs. Tartt’s right, and Frances sat in the one on her left. “Now tell me, Birdie, what brings you to Oxford to visit?”
“She’s here to celebrate my birthday … early,” Frances said. “She’s staying here with us.” A pause. “If that’s alright with you.”