Downtown by Anne Rivers Siddons

Author:Anne Rivers Siddons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Contemporary, Historical
ISBN: 9780061099687
Publisher: HarperTorch
Published: 1993-12-31T06:00:00+00:00

ering a plate of tiny sandwiches skewered with frilled tooth-

picks. From the litter of frilly toothpicks on the tabletop, I

judged that the two old ladies had not been able to wait for

us. Two empty glasses sat there, too.

I had no trouble telling which of the ladies was Brad’s

grandmother. Teddy had been right; the smaller of the two

looked precisely as his father might look in thirty years or

so, wearing one of the ghastly, frowsy Beatles wigs that sold

briskly at novelty stores. She was bent almost double, and

propped up with pillows and bolsters, and she sat with chin

on liver-spotted bosom, eyes closed and mouth agape.

I had the idiot thought that she had died, but Sarelle smiled

and made pantomimed snoring motions, and the other old

lady giggled and whispered, “She’s asleep again. She’s fallen

asleep three times since we got up this morning.”

She was vastly fat, and short, with thin white hair cut in

a Dutch bob through which her pink scalp showed, and had

a big, powdered face in the middle of which all

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 252

her little features sat. I thought of Humpty Dumpty, or a

balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But so old,

so frail—how could this desiccated dumpling of a woman

be an effective companion to the other? And then I under-

stood the shabby state of the house and grounds: Sarelle,

hired to be a housekeeper, was instead a nurse and attendant

to not one but two very elderly women. I sent Sarelle a smile

of what I hoped she would recognize as sympathy and un-

derstanding. Her answering smile was polite and bland.

“I am not asleep. You’re a hopeless fool, Isobel,” said the

other old woman, in a midge’s whine, and her eyes opened,

and I thought of a malicious old bird of prey. They were

filmed with cataracts and pouched in crepey, wrinkled flesh,

but wicked living coals burned in their depths.

“I probably am,” the hapless Isobel simpered, and speared

another sandwich. “Hey, Braddy. Let us meet this pretty girl.”

Brad kissed his grandmother and whispered something in

her ear, and she cackled, witchlike, and peered at me. I smiled

as prettily as I knew how, feeling every inch of rebellious

breast and hip as if they were naked and jiggling. This ruined,

elegant house called for height and slouching slenderness,

and cool composure. But then, Marylou Hunt had those

things in abundance, and she was not welcome here.

Sarelle vanished into the dark house and Brad sat on a

hassock drawn up to his grandmother’s side. I sat on a facing

sofa, so overstuffed that my own feet barely brushed the

floor, and smiled and smiled. Miss Isobel Davison kept up

a barrage of birdlike chatter, and ate and drank steadily, and

the glitter in her eyes told me that there was more than or-

ange juice in the pitcher, but Mama Hunt did not say another

word. She simply sat on

253 / DOWNTOWN

her sofa on the stifling hot sun porch, her bird’s legs agape

so far that one averted one’s eyes from her lap, and drank

Mimosas and stared at me. For perhaps thirty minutes, while

Brad talked lazily of home and the coming party and Miss

Isobel giggled and I smiled, she said nothing at all.

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